I did a bit of research into gender preferences in anime, based on data collected from MyAnimeList’s public api and I wanted to share with you some of my results.
I used about 17,000 female identifying and 17,000 male identifying users who had completed and rated at least 5 anime entries on MAL (I wanted to exclude those who tried 2-3 titles and then gave up).
Some general stats:
Even though the number of users was evenly split between genders, men tended to watch more anime (about 33% more). Even so, the numbers were pretty big for both genders, indicating that for the most part, these weren’t casual fans (probably because the “at least 5 anime rated” rule filtered those out). The average female user had clocked aprox 4,000 anime episodes and the average male user aprox 5,500.
Actual demographic split didn’t yield very interesting results: about half the anime men & women watched were shonen, but that was bound to be the case when shounen and anime originals (or anime without a demo tag) made up the majority of the titles in my dataset.
What was a bit more interesting: women’s average rating for all demographics was better than men’s, with one exception: josei. But that’s mostly because male ratings came in large part from a few well received titles such as Chihayafuru, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, Kids on the Slope (also Usagi Drop, but I don’t wanna get into that…).
Manga demographics split is a bit more nuanced, but since this is about anime, I won’t get into it right now. I’ll link the video I made about this at the end, and it has the manga stats as well ( + more anime details that didn’t fit into this reddit post).
Genre preferences:
Surprisingly or not, the most popular genre with both men and women was Action, especially when accounting for actual number of episodes watched. I considered episodes watched the better metric, because it accounts for the fact that a MAL entry can be one anime movie or one cour of a season, but also 1000+ episodes of One Piece.
Anyway, here’s a barchart showing genre popularity by gender:
https://preview.redd.it/ify9omh7w4mg1.png?width=630&format=png&auto=webp&s=8267c6e597ded6d30e3e03b8134bb40afb4ad6ca
Next are some lists of the most popular and best rated anime for both genders. When selecting these, I removed anything that wasn’t a first season (so no sequels, prequels and so on). The scores here were calculated using a Bayesian average, so as to compensate a bit for the large difference in total counts between individual series.
Here’s a list of the top 20 most popular anime with women:
| Title |
Counts |
Score |
| Demon Slayer |
10909 |
8.42 |
| Attack on Titan |
10849 |
8.59 |
| Jujutsu Kaisen |
10488 |
8.45 |
| Death Note |
10175 |
8.49 |
| Your Name |
9971 |
8.60 |
| Spy x Family |
9878 |
8.55 |
| A Silent Voice |
9810 |
8.70 |
| Boku no Hero Academia |
9778 |
7.73 |
| Spirited Away |
9217 |
8.79 |
| Howl's Moving Castle |
8796 |
8.76 |
| Chainsaw Man |
8770 |
8.29 |
| The Promissed Neverland |
8440 |
8.52 |
| Tokyo Ghoul |
8267 |
7.67 |
| Apothecary Diaries |
8013 |
8.97 |
| One Punch Man |
7831 |
8.18 |
| Haikyuu!! |
7693 |
8.51 |
| Erased |
7647 |
8.31 |
| Violet Evergarden |
7589 |
8.75 |
| Horimiya |
7481 |
8.01 |
| Noragami |
7472 |
8.12 |
Most popular with men:
| Title |
Counts |
Score |
| Attack on Titan |
12324 |
8.56 |
| Demon Slayer |
12121 |
8.20 |
| Jujutsu Kaisen |
11881 |
8.26 |
| One Punch Man |
11660 |
8.44 |
| Chainsaw Man |
11320 |
8.37 |
| Death Note |
11110 |
8.60 |
| Spy x Family |
10734 |
8.35 |
| Your Name |
10705 |
8.73 |
| Boku no Hero Academia |
10684 |
7.68 |
| Re:Zero |
10668 |
8.35 |
| KonoSuba |
10506 |
8.04 |
| Sousou no Frieren |
10219 |
9.22 |
| A Silent Voice |
10185 |
8.98 |
| Sword Art Online |
10120 |
7.25 |
| Mushoku Tensei |
9690 |
8.32 |
| Kaguya-sama Love is War |
9649 |
8.38 |
| Solo Leveling |
9637 |
8.00 |
| Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai |
9452 |
8.26 |
| Dandadan |
9344 |
8.36 |
| My Dress-Up Draling |
9293 |
8.09 |
Best rated by women:
| title |
Counts |
Score |
| Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood |
6868 |
9.16 |
| Sousou no Frieren |
7191 |
9.10 |
| Hunter x Hunter (2011) |
6526 |
9.02 |
| Apothecary Diaries |
8013 |
8.97 |
| Monster |
2636 |
8.90 |
| One Piece |
3228 |
8.80 |
| Spirited Away |
9217 |
8.79 |
| Howl's Moving Castle |
8796 |
8.76 |
| Gintama |
2021 |
8.76 |
| Violet Evergarden |
7589 |
8.75 |
| Nana |
3933 |
8.74 |
| Steins;Gate |
4977 |
8.73 |
| Link Click |
3293 |
8.73 |
| A Silent Voice |
9810 |
8.70 |
| Vinland Saga |
4526 |
8.65 |
| To Be Hero X |
1549 |
8.63 |
| Your Name |
9971 |
8.60 |
| Orb: On the Movements of the Earth |
1652 |
8.59 |
| Attack on Titan |
10849 |
8.59 |
| Takopii no Genzai |
3115 |
8.58 |
Best rated by men:
| title |
Counts |
Score |
| Sousou no Frieren |
10219 |
9.22 |
| Steins;Gate |
8669 |
9.14 |
| Hunter x Hunter (2011) |
8204 |
9.04 |
| Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood |
9076 |
9.03 |
| A Silent Voice |
10185 |
8.98 |
| Legend of the Galactic Heroes |
776 |
8.86 |
| Monster |
3708 |
8.86 |
| Vinland Saga |
8466 |
8.78 |
| Apothecary Diaries |
6596 |
8.78 |
| Hajime no Ippo |
2281 |
8.75 |
| Your Name |
10705 |
8.73 |
| One Piece |
4851 |
8.72 |
| Takopii no Genzai |
4278 |
8.72 |
| Bocchi the Rock! |
7166 |
8.68 |
| Violet Evergarden |
7537 |
8.67 |
| The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya |
2958 |
8.66 |
| Kaguya-sama Love is War |
8642 |
8.65 |
| Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch |
8162 |
8.64 |
| Gintama |
2752 |
8.64 |
| Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann |
5789 |
8.64 |
This is the full video with additional numbers and titles, as well as the manga version of this: Full youtube analysis video
I’m currently working on gathering even more users, so I can extract more specific trends for individual titles.
Based on the data collected so far, I wanted to address one common claim: “Men don’t watch (read) shoujo, women watch shounen”. This one, while technically true for the most part, is commonly used in a way that implies women try a bit of everything, while men are biased against and actively avoid anything labeled for women.
Now, it would be surprising if there were no biases involved, that part is hard to fully account for. But looking strictly at the data, what I’m seeing suggests that both men and women are largely making choices aligned with their genuine preferences.
Let me explain what I mean by this. And I’ll need to address the first part, the one about women watching everything. That’s not really the case, at least not the same women. I divided the female users in my dataset into 3 groups: own-demo, cross-demo and balanced, based on their manga reading habits. I used manga because the rather low diversity of anime adaptations in terms of demographics makes this kind of grouping less meaningful. Since most of my manga readers also watch anime, though, anime trends can still be analyzed through these same groups.
Most women were either firmly own-demo(shoujo + josei) or cross-demo (shounen + seinen), with about 80% of their rated titles coming from their preferred demographic labels. The balanced group was by far the smallest (with the cross-demo one being the largest).
With the 3 major groups now being own-demo women, cross-demo women and men, I looked at rating trends for each. And their rating behaviours align with what you would expect: own-demo women rate female labeled titles the highest, cross-demo women slightly lower, and men slightly lower still.
The differences in ratings aren’t huge, in general the groups agree on whether something is good or not. What they do not agree on is how good. Think something along the lines of own-demo women averaging a 9, cross-demo 8.5 and men 8. While 8 is still a good rating, the gap between 9-8 averages contains more titles than the average anime viewer will watch in their lifetime. Basically, what these groups watch seems to be in accordance with how they rate.
What’s more, shoujosei that are not primarily romance focused do have a higher proportional participation from men and cross-demo women. However, the total audience size for those titles tends to be smaller overall.
Lemme give you an example with a few popular shoujo titles (that aren't primarily romance):
Banana Fish had this share: 30% from men, 48% from cross-demo women, 22% from own-demo women. Average rating from own-demo women 8.7, cross-demo women 8.4 and from men: 7.8.
Yona of the Dawn: 30% men, 35% cross-demo women, 35% own-demo women. Avg ratings: own-demo women 8.7, cross-demo women 8.2 and men 7.7.
By contrast, overall ratios for all shoujo and josei series were: 17% men, 18% cross-demo women, 65% own-demo women.
Basically, these kinds of titles got a larger part of their ratings from the groups that were more likely to rate them lower (and again, lower does not mean low, just enough to indicate a decrease in preference). Which is probably something that factors into why they struggle to stay visible.
TLDR: the pattern suggests audience clustering based on preferences.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it for now, the last part is still in the preliminary phase, I’m working on going deeper into it, after gathering more data.
Suzarever's Lounge 
