Name gender: how a first name maps to male, female or unisex
A name’s gender is a statistical pattern, not a property of the name: it is the share of people with that name who were registered as male or female. In US birth records from 1880 to 2024, 94.9% of the 483,198 people named Jean are girls; in France, 99.97% of 1,910,805 are boys. Most names lean strongly one way, some are genuinely split, and some change sides between countries or over time.
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What “name gender” actually measures
When a birth is registered, the name and the sex are recorded together. Add those records up and every name gets a split: the United States Social Security Administration has registered 4,138,807 girls and 15,172 boys named Mary since 1880, so Mary is 99.6% female in that population. That percentage is what a name gender lookup reports. It describes how a name has been used, not how any particular person identifies.
The split only means something next to the number of records behind it. A name recorded 50 times can show 100% female by chance; a name recorded four million times cannot. That is why a careful answer always carries a sample size, and why a name with no counted records should be reported as unknown rather than guessed.
Counted records exist for fewer countries than most people expect. National statistics offices in the United States, England and Wales, France, Canada, Ireland, Spain and Norway publish counts by name and sex. Many other countries publish only a top-100 list or nothing at all, and there the best available evidence is a list of names labelled male or female without counts.
Unisex names: where the split is close
A unisex name is one whose split sits well away from 100%. In the full US record from 1880 to 2024, only a small group of common names lands between 40% and 60% female. Many more lean one way while still being used for both, which matters when a greeting or a report depends on the answer.
Treat a split near the middle as information, not as noise. Riley at 57% female does not mean the lookup is unsure about the data; it means the data itself is split. The right response is a neutral fallback, not a coin toss.
| Name | Share female (US, 1880–2024) | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Emerson | 49.7% | 63,884 |
| Finley | 54.7% | 40,470 |
| Riley | 57.1% | 240,644 |
| Quinn | 57.8% | 86,098 |
| Jessie | 60.4% | 280,859 |
| Peyton | 62.5% | 138,501 |
| Casey | 40.3% | 193,422 |
| Skyler | 39.6% | 68,704 |
| Avery | 71.5% | 230,204 |
| Taylor | 74.4% | 442,358 |
| Jordan | 25.3% | 533,161 |
| Charlie | 17.3% | 219,878 |
The same name, a different gender in another country
Names travel, and they do not always keep their gender on the way. Across the official counts of the seven countries above, 399 names are at least 70% girls in one country and at least 70% boys in another. France and the United States disagree most often, largely through French masculine names that are feminine in American use.
This is why a country hint changes the answer. Asking about Andrea without a country returns the global majority, which is female; asking about Andrea in France returns male, because 79% of the children registered as Andrea there are boys. The full table of flipping names is published as an open dataset.
| Name | Mostly girls | Mostly boys |
|---|---|---|
| Jean | United States 94.9% | France 100% (1.9 million records) |
| Joan | United States 98.5% | Spain 99.3% (Catalan form of John) |
| Andrea | Spain 97.3%, United States 98.7% | France 79.4% |
| Kim | United States 83.7%, Ireland 98.6% | Norway 93.2% |
| Toni | United States 98.5% | Spain 100%, France 96.8% |
| Ashley | United States 98.2% | England and Wales 81.4% |
| Laurence | France 100% | United States 98.8% |
A name’s gender can change over time
Totals hide history. Leslie was 11% female among US births in the 1900s and 97% female in the 2000s. Riley went from 1% female in the 1960s to 76% in the 2020s, and Avery from 9% to 80% over the same period. Madison barely existed as a girls’ name before the 1980s and was 99% female among the 194,162 births of the 2000s.
A lookup built on all years together reports the long-run average. For a customer born in 1950 that can be the wrong answer, and for a newborn it can lag behind current use. When age or birth year is known, it is worth treating names with a strong shift over time as ambiguous even when the total looks decisive.
How to check a name’s gender properly
Use the country when you have it, keep unknown as its own value, and store the probability and the number of records next to the answer so you can change your threshold later without re-running the data. A threshold is a decision about risk: a salutation can use a strict cut-off with a neutral fallback, while an aggregate report can keep lower-confidence answers as long as they are counted separately.
Do not use name-based inference for decisions about a person, such as hiring, credit, insurance or eligibility. A name tells you how a population has used it, not who someone is.
The checker above answers one name at a time. For a spreadsheet, upload the file in the dashboard and download it with gender, probability and confidence columns added; for an application, the API takes a country code and returns the same evidence fields.
Questions
Is a name male or female?
Neither, strictly. A name has a split: the share of people with that name who were registered as male or female. Mary is 99.6% female in US birth records; Riley is 57% female. The split can also differ by country and change over time.
What is a unisex name?
A name whose split is far from 100% for either gender. In US birth records from 1880 to 2024, Emerson (49.7% female), Finley (54.7%) and Riley (57.1%) are among the most evenly split common names.
Why does the same name have a different gender in different countries?
Names move between languages and keep their spelling but not always their use. Jean is the French form of John and 100% male in France, but 94.9% female in the United States. Across seven countries with official counts, 399 names flip in this way.
Where does name gender data come from?
The strongest evidence is official counts of registered births or residents by name and sex, published by national statistics offices. Where no counts exist, lists of names labelled male or female are used, and results based on them should be treated as unverified.
Can I check the gender of a name for free?
Yes. The checker on this page needs no account. A free account adds 100 lookups a day through the API or a spreadsheet upload.
Related pages
Check the likely gender associated with a first name. See probability, sample size and source, with an optional country hint and no signup required.
How gender inference from a name works, when country matters, what probability and sample size mean, and how to handle ambiguous or unknown results.
Every name lookup returns a probability, a sample size and a confidence tier. What each one measures, how the tiers are set, and where to put your threshold.
Of 18,076 names given to at least 500 US babies since 1880, 47 are mostly male in one country and mostly female in another. The full list, with counts.
Some ordinary names flip gender across borders, and the error is systematic rather than random. What the country parameter does, and where the data comes from.
Check whether a first name is male or female in three steps. Real birth-record numbers for Taylor, Robin, Kim, Jean and Andrea show when to trust the answer.
Check it against your own list
Every number on this page is reproducible with a free key. If your data breaks it, that is the more interesting result.