A low female to male ratio would result in a very low birth rate and would make starter pokemon (and similar rare pokemon like Eevee) endangered species, which would make sense given that they are typically not found in the wild in the present and are only given out by professors. Though that's probably not what the devs were thinking about in gen 2, it was likely just to make it harder for players to breed starters
low female to male ratio does not necessarily equate to a low birthrate. These are separate, but sometimes related, things. Fecundity (number of progeny per individual) could be very high such as with queen ants)
they definitely could have changed to 50/50 or something in later gens, but I guess it was too bedded in at that point, despite all starters being very easily obtainable. Thanks for the comment!
@@l.n.3372 workers cannot typically reproduce though, and when they do it's either a species with gamergates, in which they usually replace queens, or it's one of the rare instances where a trophic egg managed to develop, in which case they will develop into a male. so if we take only reproductives into account, more males are produced than females, although since males only live for a few weeks at a time, when it's not nuptial flight (mating) season there will probably be more living reproductive females than males, but that depends on whether we're considering all ants in the world, all ants in a given region, a specific species, or an individual colony
6:43 The female still does determine the species of the Egg to this day (when Ditto isn't involved), that's never changed. Also, the scarcity explanation can fit for more Pokémon besides starters. The majority of the Pokémon with 7 males for each female, were most easily or exclusively obtained as one-time gift Pokémon in their debut games (besides Fossil Pokémon in more recent games). Snorlax was also originally limited in number. So most of these Pokémon, not just starters, are scarce, artificially boosting that with their gender ratio makes a lot of sense.
Worth adding to this: If you were to remove every Pokemon that doesn't have this sort of built-in scarcity (fossils, starters, gifts, and Snorlax) from the equation, you end up with 3 Pokemon left over: Relicanth, Combee, and Salandit. Two of these Pokemon, Combee and Salandit, have a gender-based evolution where only females evolve, while Relicanth is intended to check all the boxes for a fossil Pokemon _except_ needing to be revived from a fossil. That means that _just_ running on wild-caught Pokemon would produce different results that _may_ be more gender-neutral.
super interesting points from both - thank you so much! many have suggested re-running this again factoring in encounter rates and general ability to obtain the pokemon, which would be a lot more work, but very interesting
5:38 but... That's not true... Kecleon, Finneon and Lumineon are all in the 50-50 category. I have no idea where you got that data, honestly. I feel like this could be engagement bait, maybe?
-Yeah, even in their linked data spreadsheet in the description, it correctly shows those 3 in the 50-50 category. So I have no idea what they're talking about. I know it's a small thing, but it's such an intensely nonsense observation that it kinda soils this video for me.- Edit: now in pinned :D
someone has manually added this in, which is great, but yeah I decided against it for simplicity and the theoretical reason listed in the video - if something doesn't have a gender, it isn't included in the average of genders
I wish more Pokémon were like the Nido lines where it's very separate design, stat line, and move set by gender. Nidoran lines are just so unique but more Pokémon could have been that way too.
Volbeat & Illumise, Wormadam & Mothim, and the forms of Indeedee all have those traits too (Latias and Latios too but they're not connected mechanically like the others). Meowstic, Basculegion, and Oinkolonge also have different forms for each gender which vary with two of those traits.
@tortoisecity I'll be honest, when I first played crystal as a kid, I thought that Heracross was a split evolution from Pinsir. I kept trying to evolve my Pinsir to get Heracross only to be sad when it never transformed.
5:43 No they aren't. Kecleon, Finneon & Lumineon are all 50/50. Also, you may've missed another group in the 87.5% M/12.5% F group: The fossil Pokemon. (Excluding the Gen 8 fossils, which are Gender Unknown.) Not to mention, the -eon suffix is generally only in the English names, but all Pokemon original names are Japanese; The Eon suffix is an English localization quirk. Otherwise, okay analysis video! Thanks for uploading!
that is pure error on my part, pinned comment now serves as correction. I did note the fossil pokemon, which are a significant portion of that gender ratio group. Thanks for the comment!
I feel like if expanding on the concept of attack IVs, it would be really cool if the Attack IVs to gender would be reversed with certain egg groups (or Pokémon related to the egg groups of their evolution stages), to reflect on how certain female animals are bigger and more powerful then their corresponding males. Things like Water 2-3 and Bug for example could have this trait.
the starter gender ratio connundrum is most likely a scarcity thing as you mentioned; because not only does the 87.5/12.5 ratio exist for starter pokemon, it exists for all *gift* pokemon that could not be found in the wild otherwise. prior to recent generations, fossil pokemon, eevee + its evolutions, riolu, togepi, zorua, panpour/pansage/pansear and kubfu all fall into this category. in my mind it was safe to assume its to make these rare, one-per-playthrough, not found in the wild, pokemon all the rarer by making it hard to find a female to breed for a second or third.
Yeah, considering ditto is a pokemon you only get later in the game (or even in postgame) they wanted those pokes to really be an unique one until you had finished the main story
scarcity is right I think, but it's just a bit antiquated now, since obtaining multiple gift/starter pokemon is really easy through online trading. Also, Ditto is obtained really early in GSC, but that was just to help introduce breeding and the daycare center.
@@tortoisecity It indeed is antiquated, but gamefreak (and nintendo in general) is very antiquated when making games, till this day they fear giving players options both in the metaphorical and the literal sense when making their games.
@@tortoisecity oh for sure; i just wanted to mention its not just starter pokemon, but gift pokemon in general. its detail i think ought to go but i doubt it will for 'tradition'
very much true - though you'd need to fix each species to a certain point, given some pokemon have incredibly variable spawn rates throughout different games.
Not to be that guy, but they end in "eon" in English. This is a Japanese game, and their official names are pronounced differently but not always (lumineon > Neolant ネオラント for example). Kecleon > Kakureon / カクレオン are. Seems more like a pure coincidence.
Where are you reading that kecleon and finneon have the same gender ratio as eevee and the starters? Bulbapedia doesn't say they do, so either there's an oversight there or an oversight wherever you were reading from. But yeah, for the starters it seems safe to say that kind of like the legendaries, the idea is to keep them rare, especially considering this is shared with the fossil 'mons, which one can also see the developers wanting to keep rare (it wouldn't make sense to have a bunch of presumably-extinct omanytes wandering around, right?). Though with that in mind, one could argue that counting each species as equal falsely assumes equal scarcity between them, which is certainly false - it's more likely that you'd have one starter and several of the usually-even-gender-ratio species in one game. Not to mention that treating each form in a line as separate will also skew things - realistically most trainers will have their bulbasaur, ivysaur and venusaur for example all be the same individual in one playthrough. So it seems the conclusion of this data reading would more state that the average stage of a species of pokémon is likely male more than the average individual pokémon is (assuming stages were counted separately).
on the -eons, pure error on my part, so have pinned a correction. I think it would be super interesting to weight the data by how easy it is to obtain them, but went a bit beyond the limited scope I had for this video. May be something to look into in future. Thanks for the comment!
And Solgaleo and Lunala are in the gender unknown group, but a Solgaleo and a Lunala must get together somehow to create a Cosmog as seen in the generation seven games when we go to get a Cosmog for the Pokédex in those games. One has to be male and the other female, but scientists in the Pokémon world can’t determine which one is which gender, thus the genderless category for both Solgaleo and Lunala along with their pre-evolutions.
Yeah, and I guess they aren't attracted to any other species and can't be taught to attract their own species in battle, so that categorization probably reflects that.
there are so many quirks like this throughout the dataset, but this is a very good example of how ambiguous it can get in certain cases - pokemon itself doesn't really know what to do with these, and I do not either. Thanks for the comment!
@moon4236 Is that stated anywhere in the games themselves? Or is it just something that feels easy to infer with solgaleo being modelled after a male lion and a lot of well-known lunar deities being goddesses? I think I've heard the game itself does refer to zacian as female and zamazenta as male directly but doesn't categorize them as such within the game data. Not sure I heard anything specific about the Alola legends.
If you think that 55 to 45 is a lot, i'm just curious about what you would think if you did the same but with the pokémon that are owned by trainers in every region
I think evolutions would also skew the data. These pokemon are of the same species but having more evolutions would skew their particular ratio group more than a 1 stage Pokémon.
this is probably true! afaik azurill was one of the few to have a different ratio to its evolutions, so generally speaking the rule should be true across the data set. Thanks for the comment!
Bro as a girl, when I was a kid I hated the fact that starters were mostly male and would always reset the game until I got a female one, I also would only play with female pokemon.
it would be cool if we just took the percentage of each gender among each species of pokemon and averaged all of the percentages of the same gender, then took a look at each average gender value. this way we can still include the genderless pokemon, with each genderless pokemon having 100% genderless and the others just having 0% genderless in the calculations. that way, the male and female percentages of all pokemon would be slightly lowered, and there would be a small genderless percentage.
I wonder if anything changes if instead of give all Pokémon equal weight, a Pokémon has more or less “weight” by total encounter rate in a give game/region. Would the more common mons have a 50/50 ratio, and push the average even more balanced?
this would be interesting - though you'd probably have to limit it to specific regions for most pokemon, given the variable rarity between many pokemon spawn at in different games. Thanks for the comment!
@tortoisecity agreed - unless we took it yet another level further, and averaged per encounterable tile (I'm putting aside modern games and static encounters for this purpose)
You could decide on a way to deal with statics and the stranger encounter methods in some way or other, but every way would be flawed in some way or other
I'd count gender unknown as another category. I took your spreadsheet and adjusted it slightly. In the "Alll of em" tab, I renamed the gender ratio tab Female, added a column next to it, which was 1-Female, which I labeled male. Then I appended the list with the unknown Pokemon, which all had a value of 1 in a third column "Unknown" Finally, at the bottom, I divided the sum of each column by the number of Pokemon (1025) Here are the results. Female Male Unknown 38.45% 46.43% 15.12% That being said, I don't believe this is a sufficient model. It fails to account for encounter rates. We all know that there are far more Zubat's than Charmanders. I would propose getting encounter rate tables, then multiplying the rates by the number of tiles the encounter rates apply to, then applying gender ratios. All Pokemon that can't be found as random encounters would effectively be removed from the equation, as these Pokemon are finite, while random encounter Pokemon are infinite. I'd count all recurring objects (rock smash, headbutt trees) as 1 tile a piece. Swarm Pokemon would have their encounter tables multiplied by the percentage of the time you can expect swarms to be active. It's less clear what to do with encounters tied to time periods (Lapras on Friday) or purchasable Pokemon.
that's super interesting - I would have thought the male rate would be slightly lower as a result of including the unknowns, but it stays relatively constant. Thanks for doing that! I did consider weighting by encounter rate at the beginning, but decided against it on the basis of simplicity, I just don't quite have the skills or time for a project of that size, but maybe in future I will take another look at it. Thanks for the comment!
@@tortoisecity Oh, the encounter rate was a joke if that wasn't clear. Doing the job that thoroughly is going to take hundreds of hours. As far as the rate changes go, what you had was effectively female/(male+female) Including the unknown genders should multiply the male and female rates both by 84.88%, but their relative ratios should stay constant.
I notice that pokémon with unknown gender are pokémon in which it simply does not make sense to have a gender. Pokémon that aren't biological beings tend to not have gender, i.e. klink & golett. Ditto is an amoeba that can shapeshift into any other pokémon, maushold is a family of mice, in which you'd logically otherwise have a pokémon with two genders, and shedinja is the shedded skin of a ninjask, which shouldn't have its own gender, because why would it.
There are five Pokémon who, despite being Gender Unknown within the game mechanics, can be given values for your calculation, and two more that can, by relation to the first five, can be *assumed* to have genders. The Pokédex describes Solgaleo as the "male evolution of Cosmog", and Lunala as the female evolution. This lines up with the real world alchemical genders of the sun and moon, and the terminology of "celestial sex" for an eclipse. With this knowledge, we can presume that the fact that Solgaleo and Lunala are counterparts and treated as equally common, that Cosmog and Cosmoem have 50/50 gender ratios. Similarly, Zacian's Pokédex entry refers to Zamazenta as her brother, and vice versa for Zacian's description within Zamazenta's entry. Thus we know that Zacian is female and Zamazenta is male. This one is more word of Dante than word of god, but Lugia was intended by its creator to be female. He saw her as a motherly creature, and was pissed when it was marked Gender Unknown just because it was a legendary.
@@Rot8erConeX Small correction: There is no Pokédex entry that refers to Zamazenta as Zacian's brother and it is Zacian's Shield entry that refers to Zacian potentially being Zamazenta's elder sister.
The biggest effect the 87.5% male Starter had was making Whitney that much harder, because Pokemon can't be gay, and apparently need a gender to fall in love (Justice for Cryogonal ❄️)
While the 87.5% male group skews things in that direction, there are more all-female Pokemon than all-male. Also, I wonder what happens if you account for evolution families? Pokemon do not change gender as they evolve (Azurill notwithstanding) so each evolution family should really count for 1. As starters and Eevee are all relatively large evolution families, this could balance things out better.
Definitely true that you could weight the data different ways to factor in encounter rates and species groups, would be interesting for future looking into. Thanks for the comment!
1:00 its not really that important for competitive pokemon anymore With the exception of 0 IVs in attack and speed, all desirable traits can be more easily obtained with items like mints
Engineer here with a couple of recommendations for refining your analysis. 1. Consider using a variable-based approach instead of a binary scoring system. Instead of a scale from 0 to 1 to explain how “female” a species trends, describe the percentage outcome of a species as a sum of variables A, B, and C, where those letters represent the three gender values possible for a Pokemon, with the sum of these three values being 1 for a given species. Each of these values can be tracked in a spreadsheet column, and averaged at the bottom. 2. Perform an analysis of evolutionary families, rather than individual species, as a comparison to examine how much large evolutionary families skew the results. In the world of Pokemon, evolved forms do not seem to exist in isolation of their pre-evolved forms, so the whole evolutionary line’s population is dependent on the first stage. For this reason, when considering species that can only evolve when they possess a particular gender, use the first-stage species’ ratio and do not average. After all, the sum of females in a population of Salandit and Salazzle cannot exceed the initial female population of female Salandit when all individuals were unevolved.
These are both good suggestions! Will definitely keep these in mind for when I next open a large spreadsheet, which will probably not be long. Thanks for the comment!
How did you handle gender-dependent evolutions? While Vespiquen is exclusively female, only 12.5% of Combee can become Vespiquen at all. Ralts family are 50/50 but have an exclusively male and female branching evolution.
no special treatment for these lines - this calculation did not factor in how frequently those pokemon would appear in games, but it would be interesting to see, unfortunately probably a bit beyond my skill set. Thanks for the comment!
That's a fair start but distribution is worth factoring in. You should check all the encounter tables and add them together and multiply the gender rate of the species by how populous the species is to determine what the actual gender distribution is of pokemon in the world.
I did consider doing this early, but decided against for simplicity's sake. It would be super interesting to look at though, may be something to look into in future
would all be super interesting to look into! I did start changing some stuff to filter by color, but decided against it to keep the video a bit simpler
Feel like there should have been some accounting for evolution families... feels a little off that Eevee effectively gets 9 spots in the statistics Oh, and I'm pretty confident in saying that most of the mostly male ratioed 'mon are done specifically to make breeding them harder... I even want to say that Pokemon Coloseum's Espeon and Umbreon you start the game with were hard coded to be male 100% of the time for that very reason.
There are a lot of valid ways to break the data down, but when I do these types of analysis I typically keep it fairly narrow to make it so the videos aren't 30 minutes long, because it can easily stretch out that far if I did a lot of the (very interesting and valid things) that people helpfully suggest
@tortoisecity Understandable... Plus this way you have the option of doing a "part 2" video covering some of the other ways to break down the data, should you want to.
I won't advise actually doing this because it'd be _a lot_ of work, but you could also extrapolate this question out; while this is the average gender per species, you could also take into account how rare the species are. For a _simple_ example, FRLG Mt. Moon bottom floor spawns Clefairy (a 3:1 F:M Pokemon) at a 6% rate. Zubat, Geodude, and Paras (the other Pokemon down there) all have 50/50 genders. This means that there's a 48.5% chance of catching a male Pokemon in Mt. Moon's bottom floor and a 51.5% chance of catching a female. Again, way too much work to actually _advise_ trying to figure this out, but the title _does_ imply the question, so...
I did consider this early on, and while it's a fascinating question that would probably have some really interesting answers, I decided not to go into that for exactly that reason: it would be so much work. Could be interesting to do with a more limited dataset, like one game or generation? Anyway, thanks for the comment!
Reasonably so, but they make up a relatively small proportion of all pokemon so guess it makes some sense that it's about there (plus some legendaries are gendered, increasingly so in later gens)
Maybe they decided to make starters mostly male because it makes for a better average attack DV in Gen 2, and all starters begin with a physical move. And that started a tradition.
I suspect the skewed male gender ratio for starters is at least partially because the game is and historically has been predominantly marketed towards boys, and they thought it would be better for the average consumer to relate to their starter on some level. That theory aside, I’ve actually also done some statistical analysis on the gender ratio of pokemon for a data science class of mine. Some interesting things to look at via linear regression are the correlation between gender ratio and type and each individual stat value (as well as total stats combined) and gender ratio. I did this a while ago (just with a data set of up to SwSh) and the results were pretty striking. Also it was pretty easy to do a quick test for stats-based power creep along the way.
I like this subject quite a lot But also I have to point out something… curious Pokemon has 100% male and 100% female pokemon That’s a bit weird but… sure But… if we search for those pokemon There is a mayority of only female pokemon Which I feel makes it so A- they reproduce more easily so there are more cases of this happening Or B- is just a justification to make more femmenine pokemon, making less only male pokemon I also get that they use stereotypes but… most only male pokemon are fighting type And with only females we have at least more variety Grass Fire poison Bug flying Fairy Just curious, because I feel like we could get more only male pokemon with unique types, more than… fighting guy 100th time Also, is funny how pokemon like Lopunny, Diggersby, Gothitelle or Aromatisse and others are very much pointing to a gender difference. Yet… they can be both female and male. So… you can see a Male Gothitelle with dress and a female Diggersby with beard
I always knew about how female pokemon have lower attack Stat. So when I catch pokemon for my team, I just always want it to be male. (I don't like the female gender differences like roselia female has a longer leaf on the front of its body ect.) But it seems whenever I am encountering pokemon most of the time they always turn out being female. I have wondered to myself if growlithe, for instance, are mostly male then why every time I am encountering a growlithe it is female? Do I have just really bad luck or does it have to do with my character being female so I get more female encounters? It's been weighing heavily on my mind because when it should only be 25% female why am I not getting anything but female. Legit it takes me 30 mins of encounters to find a male. I have this problem with all generations but I mostly notice this in my gen 4 games, diamond, platinum, hgss
Maybe this was already calculated out, but since in game female pokemon have a lower attack/lowered of certain stats, is the starter pokemon trending more male simply a developer tweak to make the starters tend to be stronger than average?
@@magnus0017 Female Pokémon didn't tend to have lower Attack IVs because they were female, Pokémon were female because they had lower Attack IVs. Pokémon with skewed gender ratios simply had different thresholds for which Attack IVs corresponded to which gender, so changing a Pokémon's gender ratio doesn't make them more likely to have better stats. (Also, all of this is for gen 2 only. Gender is independent from stats in all future games).
mathmatically the "average" pokemon would be nonbinary because the female/male ratio would largely cancel out, leaving the nonbinary pokemon as outliers. What you are looking for is the "median" sx for a pokemon. Aka: which out numbers the other
you're right about that, but I think this is one case where a strict mathematical application would be disconnected from the actual gameplay - most of the pokemon you encounter would be male or female. Thanks for the comment!
It started so they'd be more difficult to breed and get multiples of, same reason as Eevee, the fossils etc. That worked in older games where there was no online trading, but it's useless in newer games considering how easy it is to trade for them. It probably just stuck as tradition
I agree that it's just something that's been maintained into the modern era, despite partner pokemon being easily obtainable in all cases with online trading and the extensive control we have over breeding now
as it turns out the -eons are not universally 87.5%.....
So what’s the corrected value?
@@smashmaniac2008the eevees still are, but the other 3 are 50/50, so it shouldn’t change the overall value too much
A low female to male ratio would result in a very low birth rate and would make starter pokemon (and similar rare pokemon like Eevee) endangered species, which would make sense given that they are typically not found in the wild in the present and are only given out by professors. Though that's probably not what the devs were thinking about in gen 2, it was likely just to make it harder for players to breed starters
low female to male ratio does not necessarily equate to a low birthrate. These are separate, but sometimes related, things.
Fecundity (number of progeny per individual) could be very high such as with queen ants)
they definitely could have changed to 50/50 or something in later gens, but I guess it was too bedded in at that point, despite all starters being very easily obtainable. Thanks for the comment!
@@auxin903
But don't ant have a very high female to male ratio, as all workers are female?
@@l.n.3372 workers cannot typically reproduce though, and when they do it's either a species with gamergates, in which they usually replace queens, or it's one of the rare instances where a trophic egg managed to develop, in which case they will develop into a male. so if we take only reproductives into account, more males are produced than females, although since males only live for a few weeks at a time, when it's not nuptial flight (mating) season there will probably be more living reproductive females than males, but that depends on whether we're considering all ants in the world, all ants in a given region, a specific species, or an individual colony
@@tortoisecity nah, I prefer it this way
6:43 The female still does determine the species of the Egg to this day (when Ditto isn't involved), that's never changed.
Also, the scarcity explanation can fit for more Pokémon besides starters. The majority of the Pokémon with 7 males for each female, were most easily or exclusively obtained as one-time gift Pokémon in their debut games (besides Fossil Pokémon in more recent games). Snorlax was also originally limited in number. So most of these Pokémon, not just starters, are scarce, artificially boosting that with their gender ratio makes a lot of sense.
Worth adding to this: If you were to remove every Pokemon that doesn't have this sort of built-in scarcity (fossils, starters, gifts, and Snorlax) from the equation, you end up with 3 Pokemon left over: Relicanth, Combee, and Salandit. Two of these Pokemon, Combee and Salandit, have a gender-based evolution where only females evolve, while Relicanth is intended to check all the boxes for a fossil Pokemon _except_ needing to be revived from a fossil. That means that _just_ running on wild-caught Pokemon would produce different results that _may_ be more gender-neutral.
super interesting points from both - thank you so much! many have suggested re-running this again factoring in encounter rates and general ability to obtain the pokemon, which would be a lot more work, but very interesting
Saying gender unknowns were "TERFed out" is brilliantly subtle.
5:38 but... That's not true... Kecleon, Finneon and Lumineon are all in the 50-50 category. I have no idea where you got that data, honestly. I feel like this could be engagement bait, maybe?
-Yeah, even in their linked data spreadsheet in the description, it correctly shows those 3 in the 50-50 category. So I have no idea what they're talking about. I know it's a small thing, but it's such an intensely nonsense observation that it kinda soils this video for me.-
Edit: now in pinned :D
have to apologise - pure error on my part, pinned a comment to serve as a correction!
Not everything that’s wrong is bait
surprised you didnt add in genderless pokemon and just make a 3 way ratio x/y/z
someone has manually added this in, which is great, but yeah I decided against it for simplicity and the theoretical reason listed in the video - if something doesn't have a gender, it isn't included in the average of genders
small correction, you could play as a girl in gen 2, but only in crystal
I did know this but didn't say it as explicitly, but you are very much correct
Aren't Kecleon and The Fineon line 50/50?
yes - this a straight up error on my part (shame, shame)
I wish more Pokémon were like the Nido lines where it's very separate design, stat line, and move set by gender. Nidoran lines are just so unique but more Pokémon could have been that way too.
Volbeat & Illumise, Wormadam & Mothim, and the forms of Indeedee all have those traits too (Latias and Latios too but they're not connected mechanically like the others). Meowstic, Basculegion, and Oinkolonge also have different forms for each gender which vary with two of those traits.
@@TheRedSmartyTauros and Miltank are also considered gender counterparts of each other.
agreed - though the nidos are some of my favourite pokemon, so I'm probably a little biased
@tortoisecity
I'll be honest, when I first played crystal as a kid, I thought that Heracross was a split evolution from Pinsir. I kept trying to evolve my Pinsir to get Heracross only to be sad when it never transformed.
That's interesting - I can see how you got there, I wonder if you would have thought the same if they'd stuck with beta her across lmao
5:43 No they aren't. Kecleon, Finneon & Lumineon are all 50/50. Also, you may've missed another group in the 87.5% M/12.5% F group: The fossil Pokemon. (Excluding the Gen 8 fossils, which are Gender Unknown.)
Not to mention, the -eon suffix is generally only in the English names, but all Pokemon original names are Japanese; The Eon suffix is an English localization quirk.
Otherwise, okay analysis video! Thanks for uploading!
that is pure error on my part, pinned comment now serves as correction. I did note the fossil pokemon, which are a significant portion of that gender ratio group. Thanks for the comment!
@@tortoisecity Thank you very much! Glad to know you appreciate it!
I feel like if expanding on the concept of attack IVs, it would be really cool if the Attack IVs to gender would be reversed with certain egg groups (or Pokémon related to the egg groups of their evolution stages), to reflect on how certain female animals are bigger and more powerful then their corresponding males. Things like Water 2-3 and Bug for example could have this trait.
that would be really cool - makes me wonder how different the games might have been if gender had continued to be calculated using attack DVs?
the starter gender ratio connundrum is most likely a scarcity thing as you mentioned; because not only does the 87.5/12.5 ratio exist for starter pokemon, it exists for all *gift* pokemon that could not be found in the wild otherwise. prior to recent generations, fossil pokemon, eevee + its evolutions, riolu, togepi, zorua, panpour/pansage/pansear and kubfu all fall into this category.
in my mind it was safe to assume its to make these rare, one-per-playthrough, not found in the wild, pokemon all the rarer by making it hard to find a female to breed for a second or third.
Yeah, considering ditto is a pokemon you only get later in the game (or even in postgame) they wanted those pokes to really be an unique one until you had finished the main story
scarcity is right I think, but it's just a bit antiquated now, since obtaining multiple gift/starter pokemon is really easy through online trading. Also, Ditto is obtained really early in GSC, but that was just to help introduce breeding and the daycare center.
@@tortoisecity It indeed is antiquated, but gamefreak (and nintendo in general) is very antiquated when making games, till this day they fear giving players options both in the metaphorical and the literal sense when making their games.
@@tortoisecity oh for sure; i just wanted to mention its not just starter pokemon, but gift pokemon in general. its detail i think ought to go but i doubt it will for 'tradition'
I would certainly bet on it being maintained in future games, no real pressure or reason to change it now
I'd like to see a chart that weighs pokemon species by how common they are.
After all, you're more likely to run into 10 zubat than a single starter.
very much true - though you'd need to fix each species to a certain point, given some pokemon have incredibly variable spawn rates throughout different games.
maybe the starters are just VERY common in a specific area which has no zubats in it
Not to be that guy, but they end in "eon" in English. This is a Japanese game, and their official names are pronounced differently but not always (lumineon > Neolant ネオラント for example).
Kecleon > Kakureon / カクレオン are.
Seems more like a pure coincidence.
Kecleon, Finneon and Lumineon are all 50-50, so not even a coincidence, just a mistake
yep pure error - pinned a comment to serve as a correction!
Where are you reading that kecleon and finneon have the same gender ratio as eevee and the starters? Bulbapedia doesn't say they do, so either there's an oversight there or an oversight wherever you were reading from.
But yeah, for the starters it seems safe to say that kind of like the legendaries, the idea is to keep them rare, especially considering this is shared with the fossil 'mons, which one can also see the developers wanting to keep rare (it wouldn't make sense to have a bunch of presumably-extinct omanytes wandering around, right?).
Though with that in mind, one could argue that counting each species as equal falsely assumes equal scarcity between them, which is certainly false - it's more likely that you'd have one starter and several of the usually-even-gender-ratio species in one game. Not to mention that treating each form in a line as separate will also skew things - realistically most trainers will have their bulbasaur, ivysaur and venusaur for example all be the same individual in one playthrough. So it seems the conclusion of this data reading would more state that the average stage of a species of pokémon is likely male more than the average individual pokémon is (assuming stages were counted separately).
on the -eons, pure error on my part, so have pinned a correction. I think it would be super interesting to weight the data by how easy it is to obtain them, but went a bit beyond the limited scope I had for this video. May be something to look into in future. Thanks for the comment!
And Solgaleo and Lunala are in the gender unknown group, but a Solgaleo and a Lunala must get together somehow to create a Cosmog as seen in the generation seven games when we go to get a Cosmog for the Pokédex in those games. One has to be male and the other female, but scientists in the Pokémon world can’t determine which one is which gender, thus the genderless category for both Solgaleo and Lunala along with their pre-evolutions.
Yeah, and I guess they aren't attracted to any other species and can't be taught to attract their own species in battle, so that categorization probably reflects that.
there are so many quirks like this throughout the dataset, but this is a very good example of how ambiguous it can get in certain cases - pokemon itself doesn't really know what to do with these, and I do not either. Thanks for the comment!
Isn't Solgaleo the male and Lunala the female?
@moon4236 Is that stated anywhere in the games themselves? Or is it just something that feels easy to infer with solgaleo being modelled after a male lion and a lot of well-known lunar deities being goddesses?
I think I've heard the game itself does refer to zacian as female and zamazenta as male directly but doesn't categorize them as such within the game data. Not sure I heard anything specific about the Alola legends.
@@jaschabull2365 it's in the pokedex
If you think that 55 to 45 is a lot, i'm just curious about what you would think if you did the same but with the pokémon that are owned by trainers in every region
take a while to get all the data together, but would be very interesting!
I think evolutions would also skew the data. These pokemon are of the same species but having more evolutions would skew their particular ratio group more than a 1 stage Pokémon.
this is probably true! afaik azurill was one of the few to have a different ratio to its evolutions, so generally speaking the rule should be true across the data set. Thanks for the comment!
Bro as a girl, when I was a kid I hated the fact that starters were mostly male and would always reset the game until I got a female one, I also would only play with female pokemon.
5:35 Footage of Bulbapedia you use in the video (4:53) and the spreadsheet you made go against this claim. What happened here?
simple answer: done goofed it (correction is pinned comment)
it would be cool if we just took the percentage of each gender among each species of pokemon and averaged all of the percentages of the same gender, then took a look at each average gender value. this way we can still include the genderless pokemon, with each genderless pokemon having 100% genderless and the others just having 0% genderless in the calculations. that way, the male and female percentages of all pokemon would be slightly lowered, and there would be a small genderless percentage.
someone has added something similar to this to the spreadsheet, which is great!
I wonder if anything changes if instead of give all Pokémon equal weight, a Pokémon has more or less “weight” by total encounter rate in a give game/region. Would the more common mons have a 50/50 ratio, and push the average even more balanced?
Interesting question, thanks for the comment!
stats nerds coming out of the woodworks for this one
Next step: factor in spawn rates to get the average gender of Pokemon instances, not just species
Great video, thank you :)
this would be interesting - though you'd probably have to limit it to specific regions for most pokemon, given the variable rarity between many pokemon spawn at in different games. Thanks for the comment!
@tortoisecity agreed - unless we took it yet another level further, and averaged per encounterable tile (I'm putting aside modern games and static encounters for this purpose)
You could decide on a way to deal with statics and the stranger encounter methods in some way or other, but every way would be flawed in some way or other
It's definitely a holdover of false scarcity.
I'd count gender unknown as another category. I took your spreadsheet and adjusted it slightly.
In the "Alll of em" tab, I renamed the gender ratio tab Female, added a column next to it, which was 1-Female, which I labeled male. Then I appended the list with the unknown Pokemon, which all had a value of 1 in a third column "Unknown"
Finally, at the bottom, I divided the sum of each column by the number of Pokemon (1025) Here are the results.
Female Male Unknown
38.45% 46.43% 15.12%
That being said, I don't believe this is a sufficient model. It fails to account for encounter rates. We all know that there are far more Zubat's than Charmanders.
I would propose getting encounter rate tables, then multiplying the rates by the number of tiles the encounter rates apply to, then applying gender ratios.
All Pokemon that can't be found as random encounters would effectively be removed from the equation, as these Pokemon are finite, while random encounter Pokemon are infinite.
I'd count all recurring objects (rock smash, headbutt trees) as 1 tile a piece. Swarm Pokemon would have their encounter tables multiplied by the percentage of the time you can expect swarms to be active. It's less clear what to do with encounters tied to time periods (Lapras on Friday) or purchasable Pokemon.
that's super interesting - I would have thought the male rate would be slightly lower as a result of including the unknowns, but it stays relatively constant. Thanks for doing that! I did consider weighting by encounter rate at the beginning, but decided against it on the basis of simplicity, I just don't quite have the skills or time for a project of that size, but maybe in future I will take another look at it. Thanks for the comment!
@@tortoisecity Oh, the encounter rate was a joke if that wasn't clear. Doing the job that thoroughly is going to take hundreds of hours.
As far as the rate changes go, what you had was effectively female/(male+female) Including the unknown genders should multiply the male and female rates both by 84.88%, but their relative ratios should stay constant.
I notice that pokémon with unknown gender are pokémon in which it simply does not make sense to have a gender. Pokémon that aren't biological beings tend to not have gender, i.e. klink & golett. Ditto is an amoeba that can shapeshift into any other pokémon, maushold is a family of mice, in which you'd logically otherwise have a pokémon with two genders, and shedinja is the shedded skin of a ninjask, which shouldn't have its own gender, because why would it.
Yeah a lot of them you look at and just think makes sense to me
There are five Pokémon who, despite being Gender Unknown within the game mechanics, can be given values for your calculation, and two more that can, by relation to the first five, can be *assumed* to have genders.
The Pokédex describes Solgaleo as the "male evolution of Cosmog", and Lunala as the female evolution. This lines up with the real world alchemical genders of the sun and moon, and the terminology of "celestial sex" for an eclipse.
With this knowledge, we can presume that the fact that Solgaleo and Lunala are counterparts and treated as equally common, that Cosmog and Cosmoem have 50/50 gender ratios.
Similarly, Zacian's Pokédex entry refers to Zamazenta as her brother, and vice versa for Zacian's description within Zamazenta's entry. Thus we know that Zacian is female and Zamazenta is male.
This one is more word of Dante than word of god, but Lugia was intended by its creator to be female. He saw her as a motherly creature, and was pissed when it was marked Gender Unknown just because it was a legendary.
I didn't know that about Lugia (if true) could be cool to look into some of that more tenuous information in future. Thanks for the comment!
@@Rot8erConeX Small correction: There is no Pokédex entry that refers to Zamazenta as Zacian's brother and it is Zacian's Shield entry that refers to Zacian potentially being Zamazenta's elder sister.
Did 3 stage pokemon get 3x as much weight in the scale compared to single stage pokemon?
nope - clean scale for each species
Now I need to know what is the average Pokémon gender across the trainers in each game… very intriguing video
Oh now that would be super interesting - must look into in future! Thanks for the comment :)
The biggest effect the 87.5% male Starter had was making Whitney that much harder, because Pokemon can't be gay, and apparently need a gender to fall in love (Justice for Cryogonal ❄️)
Cryogonal will be alone forever
While the 87.5% male group skews things in that direction, there are more all-female Pokemon than all-male. Also, I wonder what happens if you account for evolution families? Pokemon do not change gender as they evolve (Azurill notwithstanding) so each evolution family should really count for 1. As starters and Eevee are all relatively large evolution families, this could balance things out better.
Definitely true that you could weight the data different ways to factor in encounter rates and species groups, would be interesting for future looking into. Thanks for the comment!
I love videos answering questions nobody asked.
That's somehow become all I do now
1:00 its not really that important for competitive pokemon anymore
With the exception of 0 IVs in attack and speed, all desirable traits can be more easily obtained with items like mints
This is true! I forget how much post creation control we now have over pokemon stats
Engineer here with a couple of recommendations for refining your analysis.
1. Consider using a variable-based approach instead of a binary scoring system. Instead of a scale from 0 to 1 to explain how “female” a species trends, describe the percentage outcome of a species as a sum of variables A, B, and C, where those letters represent the three gender values possible for a Pokemon, with the sum of these three values being 1 for a given species. Each of these values can be tracked in a spreadsheet column, and averaged at the bottom.
2. Perform an analysis of evolutionary families, rather than individual species, as a comparison to examine how much large evolutionary families skew the results. In the world of Pokemon, evolved forms do not seem to exist in isolation of their pre-evolved forms, so the whole evolutionary line’s population is dependent on the first stage. For this reason, when considering species that can only evolve when they possess a particular gender, use the first-stage species’ ratio and do not average. After all, the sum of females in a population of Salandit and Salazzle cannot exceed the initial female population of female Salandit when all individuals were unevolved.
These are both good suggestions! Will definitely keep these in mind for when I next open a large spreadsheet, which will probably not be long. Thanks for the comment!
How did you handle gender-dependent evolutions? While Vespiquen is exclusively female, only 12.5% of Combee can become Vespiquen at all. Ralts family are 50/50 but have an exclusively male and female branching evolution.
no special treatment for these lines - this calculation did not factor in how frequently those pokemon would appear in games, but it would be interesting to see, unfortunately probably a bit beyond my skill set. Thanks for the comment!
That's a fair start but distribution is worth factoring in. You should check all the encounter tables and add them together and multiply the gender rate of the species by how populous the species is to determine what the actual gender distribution is of pokemon in the world.
I did consider doing this early, but decided against for simplicity's sake. It would be super interesting to look at though, may be something to look into in future
Interesting concept! Maybe a video on the Average Pokemon Base Stats next?
could be cool to look into - could weight by evolutionary stages, pseudo-leg and legendary pokemon, etc.
Now I have some other questions.
Average Gender of eaxh Generation/Region?
Average Gender of Types?
Average Gender of Final Evolution Pokemon?
would all be super interesting to look into! I did start changing some stuff to filter by color, but decided against it to keep the video a bit simpler
You're awesome, keep up the good work
thanks!
Feel like there should have been some accounting for evolution families... feels a little off that Eevee effectively gets 9 spots in the statistics
Oh, and I'm pretty confident in saying that most of the mostly male ratioed 'mon are done specifically to make breeding them harder... I even want to say that Pokemon Coloseum's Espeon and Umbreon you start the game with were hard coded to be male 100% of the time for that very reason.
There are a lot of valid ways to break the data down, but when I do these types of analysis I typically keep it fairly narrow to make it so the videos aren't 30 minutes long, because it can easily stretch out that far if I did a lot of the (very interesting and valid things) that people helpfully suggest
@tortoisecity Understandable... Plus this way you have the option of doing a "part 2" video covering some of the other ways to break down the data, should you want to.
Nice video!
Thanks!
I won't advise actually doing this because it'd be _a lot_ of work, but you could also extrapolate this question out; while this is the average gender per species, you could also take into account how rare the species are. For a _simple_ example, FRLG Mt. Moon bottom floor spawns Clefairy (a 3:1 F:M Pokemon) at a 6% rate. Zubat, Geodude, and Paras (the other Pokemon down there) all have 50/50 genders. This means that there's a 48.5% chance of catching a male Pokemon in Mt. Moon's bottom floor and a 51.5% chance of catching a female. Again, way too much work to actually _advise_ trying to figure this out, but the title _does_ imply the question, so...
I did consider this early on, and while it's a fascinating question that would probably have some really interesting answers, I decided not to go into that for exactly that reason: it would be so much work. Could be interesting to do with a more limited dataset, like one game or generation? Anyway, thanks for the comment!
Okay but how many % of all Pokémon are genderless?
about 15.1%, which if included would skew the data, but I chose to exclude them on the basis of gender unknown not having a gender value
@tortoisecity woah, I told there would be more considering all the legendaries
Reasonably so, but they make up a relatively small proportion of all pokemon so guess it makes some sense that it's about there (plus some legendaries are gendered, increasingly so in later gens)
Maybe they decided to make starters mostly male because it makes for a better average attack DV in Gen 2, and all starters begin with a physical move. And that started a tradition.
could have been part of it, though I find the artificial scarcity relatively compelling at this point
I suspect the skewed male gender ratio for starters is at least partially because the game is and historically has been predominantly marketed towards boys, and they thought it would be better for the average consumer to relate to their starter on some level.
That theory aside, I’ve actually also done some statistical analysis on the gender ratio of pokemon for a data science class of mine. Some interesting things to look at via linear regression are the correlation between gender ratio and type and each individual stat value (as well as total stats combined) and gender ratio. I did this a while ago (just with a data set of up to SwSh) and the results were pretty striking. Also it was pretty easy to do a quick test for stats-based power creep along the way.
That sounds super cool, and probably much more statistically sound and complex than anything I putter out. Thanks for the comment!
I like this subject quite a lot
But also I have to point out something… curious
Pokemon has 100% male and 100% female pokemon
That’s a bit weird but… sure
But… if we search for those pokemon
There is a mayority of only female pokemon
Which I feel makes it so
A- they reproduce more easily so there are more cases of this happening
Or
B- is just a justification to make more femmenine pokemon, making less only male pokemon
I also get that they use stereotypes but… most only male pokemon are fighting type
And with only females we have at least more variety
Grass
Fire poison
Bug flying
Fairy
Just curious, because I feel like we could get more only male pokemon with unique types, more than… fighting guy 100th time
Also, is funny how pokemon like Lopunny, Diggersby, Gothitelle or Aromatisse and others are very much pointing to a gender difference. Yet… they can be both female and male. So… you can see a Male Gothitelle with dress and a female Diggersby with beard
Yeah the whole dataset has a lot of quirks in it that contradict assumptions
I always knew about how female pokemon have lower attack Stat. So when I catch pokemon for my team, I just always want it to be male. (I don't like the female gender differences like roselia female has a longer leaf on the front of its body ect.) But it seems whenever I am encountering pokemon most of the time they always turn out being female. I have wondered to myself if growlithe, for instance, are mostly male then why every time I am encountering a growlithe it is female? Do I have just really bad luck or does it have to do with my character being female so I get more female encounters? It's been weighing heavily on my mind because when it should only be 25% female why am I not getting anything but female. Legit it takes me 30 mins of encounters to find a male. I have this problem with all generations but I mostly notice this in my gen 4 games, diamond, platinum, hgss
Female Pokémon only have lower attack stats in generation 2 (gold, silver & crystal) due to those games determining gender based on IVs.
Female pokemon only have a lower attack stat in Gold/Silver/Crystal. In the other games it doesn't matter.
old habits die hard I guess
Maybe this was already calculated out, but since in game female pokemon have a lower attack/lowered of certain stats, is the starter pokemon trending more male simply a developer tweak to make the starters tend to be stronger than average?
@@magnus0017 Female Pokémon didn't tend to have lower Attack IVs because they were female, Pokémon were female because they had lower Attack IVs. Pokémon with skewed gender ratios simply had different thresholds for which Attack IVs corresponded to which gender, so changing a Pokémon's gender ratio doesn't make them more likely to have better stats. (Also, all of this is for gen 2 only. Gender is independent from stats in all future games).
RedSmarty is correct there - it's a technical point, but one worth maintaining for gen 2 where it applies
I love the weird gender ratios between azurill and maril because it makes a few of them trans when they evolve and i think its cool
mathmatically the "average" pokemon would be nonbinary because the female/male ratio would largely cancel out, leaving the nonbinary pokemon as outliers.
What you are looking for is the "median" sx for a pokemon. Aka: which out numbers the other
you're right about that, but I think this is one case where a strict mathematical application would be disconnected from the actual gameplay - most of the pokemon you encounter would be male or female. Thanks for the comment!
this is fantastic and deserves more attention. i love this so much
thanks! glad you liked it :)
I'll never understand why GF made the starters' more likely to be male. There's no logical reason behind it
It started so they'd be more difficult to breed and get multiples of, same reason as Eevee, the fossils etc. That worked in older games where there was no online trading, but it's useless in newer games considering how easy it is to trade for them. It probably just stuck as tradition
I agree that it's just something that's been maintained into the modern era, despite partner pokemon being easily obtainable in all cases with online trading and the extensive control we have over breeding now