Is Kay a male or female name?
Kay is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in United States at 96% and male usage in Switzerland at 92%. 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
- female
- Probability
- 94%
- Sample size
- 105,715
- Confidence
- high
Kay 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 | female | 96% | 102,491 | ssa |
| England and Wales GB | female | 97% | 1,038 | nrs |
| Switzerland CH | male | 92% | 904 | bfs |
| Norway NO | male | 100% | 843 | ssb |
| Canada CA | female | 92% | 129 | statcan |
| Poland PL | male | 83% | 120 | pesel |
| Austria AT | male | 98% | 97 | statat |
| France FR | male | 64% | 70 | insee |
Attested in 17 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 · DE · DK · ES · FR · GB · IE · NL · NO · NZ · PL · SE · US
Kay over time
In the United States, 88.4% of the babies named Kay in the 1890s were girls, against 79.5% in the 2020s.
| Decade of birth | United States: girls | Babies |
|---|---|---|
| 1890s | 88% | 138 |
| 1900s | 92% | 491 |
| 1910s | 88% | 2,465 |
| 1920s | 78% | 3,425 |
| 1930s | 93% | 18,606 |
| 1940s | 98% | 33,377 |
| 1950s | 99% | 24,965 |
| 1960s | 99% | 12,553 |
| 1970s | 98% | 2,582 |
| 1980s | 96% | 1,464 |
| 1990s | 95% | 916 |
| 2000s | 97% | 651 |
| 2010s | 93% | 543 |
| 2020s | 80% | 273 |
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 Kay 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=Kay&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 Kay
Is Kay a male or female name?
Kay is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in United States at 96% and male usage in Switzerland at 92%. Country context changes the answer.
Why can the result for Kay 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 Kay 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.