Can you tell a cat's gender from its face?

Simple enough question. Can you tell the gender of an animal just from looking at its face? For today's experiment, we shall choose the household cat.

Be thankful I didn't choose worms, or something.

P.S. Although I didn't intend it, cats A and B look mugshots of felines up for some kind of crime. Premeditated murder of a mouse, maybe, and cat D appears to have eaten the evidence.

A: Male, B:Male, C:Male, D:Male 71
A: Male, B:Male, C:Male, D:Female 130
A: Male, B:Male, C:Female, D:Male 46
A: Male, B:Male, C:Female, D:Female 115
A: Male, B:Female, C:Male, D:Male 88
A: Male, B:Female, C:Male, D:Female 290
A: Male, B:Female, C:Female, D:Male 127
A: Male, B:Female, C:Female, D:Female 26
A: Female, B:Male, C:Male, D:Male 251
A: Female, B:Male, C:Male, D:Female 909
A: Female, B:Male, C:Female, D:Male 304
A: Female, B:Male, C:Female, D:Female 91
A: Female, B:Female, C:Male, D:Male 350
A: Female, B:Female, C:Male, D:Female 169
A: Female, B:Female, C:Female, D:Male 34
A: Female, B:Female, C:Male, D:Female 79
Ju përkthyer vërtetë kjo? 63
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Comments ( 51 )
  • Finding_Peace_In_A_Mad_World

    Cat D made me laugh xD

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    • robbieforgotpw

      What is wrong with d?

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  • NoraBaker

    I don't do cats, but I want to do this: male, female, male, female.

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    • dappled

      Okay, I'll do this quickly because I can't see the post in the list any more which usually means someone has complained about it and it's been deleted. It'll still be around for an hour or so, though, from experience.

      And I'll shamelessly pin this reply to Nora's as hers was most popular.

      All four cats were female. They were picked randomly from a cat adoption site. The responses I got show that people only really had a fix on cat A, the others showed no obvious swing. Cat A was by far the youngest cat, not long out of kittenhood, which may have swung people too (apart from wigsplitz).

      Final note: All these cats genuinely require homes. If you're thinking of getting a kitten, just spend a moment in considering adopting an adult cat.

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      • VioletTrees

        There was kind of a problem with this poll, actually, and it's a quirk in cat genetics. Calicoes and tortoiseshell cats are almost always female. Occasionally there's a male, but they're usually sterile. A and B appear to be calico, and D is tortoiseshell, which means that we can be pretty sure that those three are female. That leaves us with a 50/50 chance on C. The fact that you didn't include the correct answer meant we had a 0% chance, of course, but that's beside the point.

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        • TerryVie

          wow. How did i miss this.
          I feel really stupid now, because actually it part of my general knowledge, i just kind of didn't apply it here.
          Guess i'll blame it on work distracting me when i was taking my guess :)

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        • wigsplitz

          I kept looking at cat B and at first I thought I saw 3 colors, but as I looked more I thought it was just the contours and shadows, I thought for sure there was only white with a gray spot!! B and C looked male to me!! I got tricked on them, they were good choices to throw in there!!

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          • VioletTrees

            Ooh, I can totally see how that looks like a shadow. For all I know, that one might not actually be calico.

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        • dappled

          You are right. I only learned that about half an hour ago. It could be one of those "common knowledge" things that has escaped me but it does cause a problem with the poll. Interestingly, though, people did identify Cat A as female. I wonder if it was through knowledge, or through some memory that tricolour cats are usually female.

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      • dappled

        Side note - Nobody noticed the mistake of there being no option for:

        A: Female, B:Female, C:Female, D:Female

        ...despite this actually being the correct answer. It was a deliberate mistake, by the way, rather than an experiment, although I did notice it quite soon after approval and kept schtum to see who would notice.

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        • dappled

          Not a "deliberate" mistake, an "unintentional" mistake. This is what happens when I try to post something in five seconds flat.

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          • wigsplitz

            You're a stinker! Those 2 in the middle had me tricked!!

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            • dappled

              Me too actually. I chose the cat faces with a properly random algorithm and I predicted the gender before looking at the names (or the genders, which were listed). Partly because I was didn't want to be left out of my own poll. But yeah, my answers were exactly the same as yours. C in particular does not look like a female cat to me.

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    • TerryVie

      haha, that was my idea too. Seconded.
      I am just amused it's you doing the same guess :)
      (parrish: don't feel bad, but if i can join you or Nora...well...)

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      • NoraBaker

        Haha, I see, he decided to be an independent agent! His loss ^.~

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  • megadriver

    No, i can't tell. Usually if i want to find out, I can look what's under the tail.

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  • disthing

    More cat posts on this website... :*(

    I still voted but I hated every second of it. Why are you so obsessed with cats?!

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    • RomeoDeMontague

      Cats are wonderful creatures!

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      • disthing

        I liked cats more before the endless cat memes and cat related crap saturating the internet. They are popular domesticated animals who are low maintenance. I wouldn't say they're particularly special or wonderful, but I like them.

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    • ZiggyStardust

      Why aren't you?:P I know I am!

      Meooooooow!

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      • disthing

        Woof! WOOF! Get away!

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  • Mersaphe

    I'm very bad at this ;p

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    • Pretty much all of us are. ;)

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  • RomeoDeMontague

    Female, male, male, female

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  • sudBubble

    The bottom poll answer made me laugh so hard even though I had no idea what it meant (and still don't).

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  • Allistalla

    Im suprised tommythecat is not in this,thread?

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  • Allistalla

    They all look like boys just becuase shape and size most femalecats I have scene have smaller thinner shaped bodys than the neck is shaped diffrent. However I could be wrong Im no cat expert. I think theyall all male °c ats.

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  • an-easy-lover

    I've had more than 12 cats my whole life and i can tell a cat's gender from its face , i don't get it right all the time though D:

    i'm going with
    A: Female, B:Female, C:Male, D:Male

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  • Captain_Kegstand

    I have no damned idea? I don't think you can tell the gender of a cat just by looking at its face.

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    • wigsplitz

      There is a secret....it's not 100% but it's 99.9%. Male cats almost never display 3 colors. Color in cats is a sex-linked trait, so if it's a calico or a tortoise shell cat, 99.9% chance it's a female. On the rare occasion a male does have this coloring, it's sterile because it has XXY chromosomes instead of just plain XY like it should. So using that knowledge, A and D are 99.9% likely female. Anyway...now you know that!! lol!!

      Orange tabby cats are most often males, too, but that doesn't matter to this question. Females can be orange but it's more rare.

      There, that's probably more than you care to know about cat colors!!

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      • dappled

        This is what I love about you. When someone tells me something, I've nearly always heard it before. When you say something, it's usually something new (and something I'm interested in).

        Posting the results soon by the way so I don't mind backing up your fact now by saying the tricoloured cat is indeed female.

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      • Captain_Kegstand

        Well I guess I learned something today! I had no idea that color had anything to do with gender.

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  • Cuntsiclestick

    I dont know. Are they all male?

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  • Shackleford96

    No, I can't. How would you be able to tell anyway?

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  • chole

    I'll go with "Ju përkthyer vërtetë kjo?". Seems exotic.

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  • dom180

    I said male female female male :P Then again, I've never even owned a cat :/

    It probably is possible to know though. I've just not been exposed to enough kitties to know the differences :(

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    • dom180

      As a sidenote, I judged it through the (now obviously) imperfect formula of wide face = female, skinny face = male. I (again, wrongly) presumed you'd go for an equal male:female ratio, so I picked male for D when I was undecided.

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      • dappled

        Ooh, way too much presumption there. :P

        I'll tell you what you could have presumed, though (and which nobody did). I decided *very* early on to have a "control" group that were all the same gender (not just cats, but the dogs too). It makes the results easier to analyse and it removes a bit of guesswork (nobody guesses all the same gender, just like nobody does the lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 despite it being as likely as anything else).

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        • dom180

          Oooh, that's FAR too clever :) Although I've always thought the other reason people never pick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is because we assume it's a more common choice because the numbers are continuous. If more people pick the winning set of numbers then the jackpot everyone wins is lower, so people always try and pick sets of numbers they perceive to be obscure in the hope that if they do win they'll win more.

          If that made any sense, anyway... I'm not so good at explaining that sort of stuff. It was also a huge tangent, plus I'm betting if it did make any sense you already knew it :P

          Yours is a clever way if doing it, although, most people got 2 of the 4 right anyway and running a little experiment through IIN doesn't always work because you get to read each other's answers first which obviously skews the results.

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          • dappled

            Exactly right. In a medium-sized group, continuous numbers would be a really uncommon choice but - with something as big as the lottery - there are a proportion of people clever enough to work out that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is uncommon (so they should choose it) and because the sample size is so large, quite a number of people actually choose these numbers, invalidating the theory. Sample size is *so* important.

            Every combination of numbers has an equal chance of winning the lottery but some combinations have more chance of not sharing the prize (hence higher yield). This is what you were getting at. With a huge sample, the best way is to be fairly unspecific about what you are doing (i.e. the opposite of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) but yet still increase your chances.

            People often play the same numbers and so need a way of remembering their numbers. House numbers and birthdays loom large. And higher numbers are less common. Most roads have a number 1. Not every road has a number 49. Similarly birthdays; I don't know many people born on the 32nd to the 49th of the month. Or the 13th month onwards.

            If you pick the four least popular numbers, and then two at random (to counteract the other people doing the same), you give yourself a great chance.

            Side note: Best option is to pick 4.3 least popular numbers and 1.7 at random, but - obviously - this isn't possible, so you need to round it to four and two.

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  • Justsomejerk

    I named my female cat Stan. I obviously have no idea but I voted m f f m.

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  • well for starters tortoiseshell A & D are girls and i am guessing b & d are boys

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    • *b & c

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  • Male, male, female, female. =^.^=

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  • charli.m

    I voted for the last one. Was that a bad thing to do? I have no idea what it said.

    I don't think an animal's facial structure tells me anything about it's gender. I mean fuck, I've got kids genders wrong based on face, hair and clothes.

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    • dappled

      The last one is Albanian. If you put it into an online translator, it translates as: "You really translated this?" ;)

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      • Captain_Kegstand

        Lolz I took the time to figure what the hell it said too!

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  • anti-hero

    boy girl boy girl

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  • wigsplitz

    I think so...I'm going with female, male, male, female.

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    • shade_ilmaendu

      Thirded. :P

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    • myboyfriendsbitch

      Me too

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