Most common personality type for women and men: 19,592 tests

All 16 types for women and men

We scored the public Open Psychometrics BIG5 dataset: answers to the same 50 public-domain Big Five items that 64 Types uses, from 19,719 online volunteers around 2012.^[1] After dropping one incomplete record, 19,718 people remained, and each got a four-letter code exactly as on the 64 Types test: E/I from Extraversion, N/S from Openness, F/T from Agreeableness and J/P from Conscientiousness, each split at the median of the whole sample.

The dataset’s gender question offered three answers, male, female and other, and some people skipped it.^[1] We compare the 11,984 people who answered female with the 7,608 who answered male (N = 19,592). The 102 people who chose “other” and the 24 who left the question blank are not shown separately, because groups that small would give unreliable type shares; they are included in every whole-sample figure on the site.

For women, the most common codes are ENFJ (12.0%), ISTP (10.3%) and ESFJ (8.5%), and the rarest are ENTJ (3.2%), ENTP (3.9%) and ESTJ (4.4%). For men, the most common are ISTP (12.3%), INTP (10.4%) and ENFJ (9.2%), and the rarest are ESFP (2.8%), ISFJ (3.1%) and ISFP (3.4%).^[1] With groups this large, each share has a margin of error of under one percentage point, so codes that differ by less than that, such as INTJ and INFP among women, are effectively tied.

The largest gaps are in the SF and NT combinations. ESFP is 2.3 times as common among women as among men (6.3% vs 2.8%), ISFJ 2.1 times and ESFJ 2.0 times. ENTJ is almost twice as common among men (6.2% vs 3.2%), and so is INTP (10.4% vs 5.4%); INTJ and ENTP are each about 1.7 times as common among men. Some codes barely differ: ESTP, ESTJ, INFJ and INFP are within one point.^[1] Note that ISTP and ENFJ are common in both groups; this dataset’s overall distribution is described in the rarest personality type.

Which letters and traits differ

Each letter comes from one trait, so the type gaps can be traced to the traits. Here is the share of each group with the first letter of each pair, including the fifth 64 Types letter, C (Composed) or R (Responsive), from emotional stability:^[1]

• F (Agreeableness): 56.2% of women and 37.4% of men. This is the largest letter gap, about 19 points.
• C (Emotional stability): 46.9% of women and 59.8% of men, a gap of about 13 points.
• N (Openness): 46.7% of women and 55.6% of men, about 9 points.
• E (Extraversion): 50.8% of women and 45.4% of men, about 5 points.
• J (Conscientiousness): 51.5% of women and 48.9% of men, under 3 points.

The table below shows the same traits as average percentiles. They are measured against everyone in the sample, men and women together (the same norms the 64 Types test uses), so 50 is the middle of the combined sample. The last column is the standardized difference (Cohen’s d) on the raw trait score: positive when women score higher, and by convention about 0.2 is small and 0.5 medium.

Put simply, women in this sample described themselves as more agreeable and somewhat less emotionally stable, men described themselves as somewhat more open (on these particular items), and the gaps in extraversion and conscientiousness are very small. The pattern is the same among 18- to 34-year-olds alone (agreeableness +0.49, emotional stability −0.34, openness −0.24, extraversion +0.14, conscientiousness +0.11), and in that age group ENFJ and ISTP are again the most common codes for women and for men.^[1]

Women and men mostly share the same types

Even the largest gap leaves a great deal of overlap. On agreeableness, 67% of women score above the median man, which means a third do not. Gender accounts for about 5% of the differences between people in agreeableness, about 3% in emotional stability and about 1% or less in the other three traits.^[1] Almost all of the variation is between people of the same gender.

The type distributions overlap in the same way. If you take the smaller of the two shares for each code and add them up, men and women share 81.2% of the distribution; only about one person in five would need a different code for the two groups to match. With the fifth letter added (32 combinations), the overlap is 78.4%.^[1]

Why do codes make the gaps look bigger? A letter is a cut at the 50th percentile, and most people sit near the middle, so a modest average shift moves many people across the line. An agreeableness gap of under half a standard deviation becomes a 19-point gap in the F letter. Codes then combine four such letters, and the SF and NT combinations collect the gaps of two letters at once. That is how an ESFP can be 2.3 times as common among women although no single trait difference is large.

What larger studies find

Our numbers are broadly consistent with decades of research on gender and the Big Five:

• Across 26 cultures (N = 23,031), Costa, Terracciano and McCrae found that women reported higher Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth and Openness to Feelings, and men higher Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas. They concluded that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders, and that they were most pronounced in European and American cultures.^[2]
• Across 55 nations (N = 17,637), Schmitt and colleagues found that women scored higher than men on neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness in most countries. The average gap was largest for neuroticism (d = 0.40), and the differences were larger in prosperous, healthy and egalitarian cultures.^[3]
• At the level of aspects (N = 2,643, mainly North American), Weisberg, DeYoung and Hirsh found differences of 0.06 to 0.48 in absolute size across the aspects and the five domains, which they call small to moderate. Women scored higher on Compassion, Politeness, Volatility and Withdrawal; men scored higher on Intellect (d = −0.22) and women on the Openness aspect (d = 0.27).^[4]
• Across psychology more broadly, Hyde’s review of 46 meta-analyses found that 78% of gender differences were small or close to zero. Tender-mindedness, a facet of agreeableness, was one of the few large ones.^[5]

The Openness result is a good example of how wording matters. The Openness items in our dataset include “I have a rich vocabulary”, “I use difficult words” and “I am quick to understand things”,^[1] which lean toward what Weisberg and colleagues call Intellect, the aspect on which men scored higher. On the other aspect of the trait, which they call Openness, women scored higher, and across cultures women also score higher on Openness to Feelings.^[4][2] So the N/S gap here says more about these particular questions than about “men are more open”.

How far to trust these numbers

• Our sample is not representative. These are volunteers who took a free online test around 2012, mostly young (median age 22 for women, 23 for men), with 61% women overall.^[1] The shares describe this sample, not all women and men.
• The gender question was limited. It offered male, female or other and recorded nothing else, so we cannot say anything about non-binary or transgender people as groups. We report the excluded counts so the comparison is transparent.
• Percentiles use combined norms. Everyone is scored against the whole sample, as on the 64 Types test, not against their own gender. With separate norms for women and men, both groups would average 50 and the letter gaps would shrink to almost nothing by design.
• Our codes are not MBTI results. The letters come from Big Five scores, and the MBTI scales correspond to only four of the five Big Five dimensions,^[6] so an MBTI ISFJ may get a different code here. Figures published for the MBTI by its publisher come from a different questionnaire and different samples, and they are not comparable with ours.
• No sixth letter. Honesty-Humility (M/A), the sixth 64 Types letter, is measured with separate questions that nobody in this dataset answered, so we cannot give gender figures for all 64 types. See Honesty-Humility explained.
• Self-report and averages. Each figure describes how people rated themselves, averaged over thousands of people. None of it says how any one woman or man thinks, feels or should behave.

What this means for you

If you are a woman with an NT code or a man with an SF code, your type is less common in your group, but nothing about it is unusual: hundreds of people of your gender in this sample share it. A type tells you about your own trait scores, and your gender adds very little to that. That is why 64 Types reports percentiles alongside your letters.

The two tips below are practical suggestions, not research findings.

Frequently asked questions