Is Jess a male or female name?
Jess is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in England and Wales at 82% and male usage in United States at 98%. Country context changes the answer.
Result without a country hint
This is the response used when the request does not supply a country. It is a fallback, not a claim that every country has the same distribution.
- Association
- male
- Probability
- 95%
- Sample size
- 27,079
- Confidence
- high
Jess by country
Only sources that publish observation counts appear in this table. The probability is the dominant-gender share within that country source; sample sizes from different countries cover different years and should not be treated as population rankings.
| Country | Association | Probability | Sample | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States US | male | 98% | 25,518 | ssa |
| England and Wales GB | female | 82% | 855 | ons |
| France FR | male | 93% | 400 | insee |
| Canada CA | male | 82% | 172 | statcan |
| Ireland IE | female | 100% | 65 | cso |
| Switzerland CH | male | 84% | 58 | bfs |
| Poland PL | male | 67% | 9 | pesel |
| Austria AT | male | 100% | 2 | statat |
Attested in 14 countries and territories
Presence means the name appears in a source for that country. Sources without counts cannot support a popularity share.
AT · AU · BE · CA · CH · DK · FR · GB · IE · IN · NO · PL · SE · US
Jess over time
In the United States, 1.3% of the babies named Jess in the 1880s were girls, against 24.8% in the 2020s. In France, 11.1% of the babies named Jess in the 2000s were girls.
| Decade of birth | United States: girls | Babies | France: girls | Babies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1880s | 1% | 1,198 | — | |
| 1890s | 2% | 1,036 | — | |
| 1900s | 1% | 909 | — | |
| 1910s | 1% | 3,006 | — | |
| 1920s | 1% | 2,689 | — | |
| 1930s | 0% | 1,699 | — | |
| 1940s | 0% | 2,003 | — | |
| 1950s | 0% | 2,451 | — | |
| 1960s | 0% | 2,319 | — | |
| 1970s | 1% | 2,814 | — | |
| 1980s | 2% | 2,629 | — | |
| 1990s | 6% | 1,513 | — | |
| 2000s | 12% | 774 | 11% | 135 |
| 2010s | 9% | 333 | — | |
| 2020s | 25% | 145 | — |
Births per decade from the US Social Security Administration (1880–2024) and INSEE (France, 1900–2025); decades with fewer than 100 babies are left out. See boys' names that became girls' names and French names that changed sex.
Look up Jess with a country
Send a reliable two-letter country code when you have one. Preserve probability, sample size, confidence and source with the category.
curl "https://namegender.com/api/v1/gender?name=Jess&country=US" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ng_live_xxxxxxxxxxxx"Copy failed. Select and copy the text.
Method and limits
Counted rows come from national registration sources that publish male and female totals. The attested-country list also includes sources that confirm presence but do not publish a sample size. Those two evidence types are kept separate.
Name data describes a population-level association. It does not identify an individual person's gender. Preserve unknown and low-confidence results, and do not use name inference for employment, medical, financial, insurance, legal or eligibility decisions.
Data version: 2026.10. Read the benchmark methodology and database provenance before applying a threshold.
Questions about Jess
Is Jess a male or female name?
Jess is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in England and Wales at 82% and male usage in United States at 98%. Country context changes the answer.
Why can the result for Jess change by country?
A name can have different observed distributions in different populations. A country hint narrows the evidence used by the API instead of treating one global result as universal.
Does the name Jess identify a person's gender?
No. This page describes statistical associations in name records. It cannot identify an individual person and should not be used for consequential decisions.