Why Do People Think All Dogs Are Boys?

“Aw, he’s so sweet,” is a regular compliment I get about my two-year-old female Havanese, Briar. Even while wearing a bright pink harness attached to a purple leash, Briar constantly gets gendered as a boy while out and about. Although it’s somewhat encouraging that people don’t automatically see colors from the Barbie palette and think “girl,” it is frustrating that they always assume she’s a boy.

It also got me wondering, “Why, exactly, do people think all dogs are boys, anyway? Why is it that when we meet any dog, our instinct is to call them 'he’?” 

From “who’s a good boy?” to Hollywood’s most famous pups (think Clifford, Scooby, or Marley), dogs seem to default to masculine territory. Is referring to all dogs as a “he” just a linguistic quirk, or does it reveal something deeper about how humans project gender onto animals? I needed to find out. 

Have we been culturally trained to think dogs are boys?

According to Jessica Plonchak, licensed counselor and executive clinical director at ChoicePoint, when people see an unfamiliar dog or any other animal, they naturally consider them to be a “he” because masculine pronouns have always been treated as the neutral or default option — not only in language, but also in culture. “If we talk about the English language specifically, ‘he’ has been associated with things of unknown gender, so we can say it’s a psychological bias,” Plonchak says. 

So, this isn’t just about grammar. It’s really about how our culture codes masculinity as the default lens through which we see the world, including our pets.

In contrast, why do we assume cats are girls?

One of the more interesting aspects of why people think all dogs are boys has to do with how our brains prefer binaries. According to Shiloh Whitney, an associate professor of philosophy at Fordham University who studies gender and social theory, the masculinization of dogs may have less to do with dogs themselves and more to do with how we culturally feminize their domestic-pet counterparts, cats.

“The gender binary shows up everywhere — sun and moon, public and private spaces, dogs and cats,” Whitney said. “When one side of the pair gets feminized, the other tends to get masculinized. It’s not necessarily rational, it’s just the way our culture organizes the world.”

According to Whitney, there’s some kind of coding of dogs as masculine. “But that might not just be because we see dogs as strong or authoritative — it’s because gender functions as a kind of organizing principle for binary pairs wherever they occur,” she explains. “In this case, we think about dogs in a pair with cats. It may be that the masculinization of dogs has as much to do with the feminization of cats.”

Why does the idea of masculinity stick to dogs? 

Historically, dogs were bred and valued for protection. They helped to guard homes, herd livestock, and accompany hunters. Those were “masculine” jobs in human society, and dogs naturally inherited that coding.

Today, many dogs will act as “guard dogs” and will bark to protect the home, Whitney says. “They enforce boundaries and keep people out of your home. That’s a job we’ve traditionally seen as masculine — the work of enforcement and protection,” she explains. 

Even the emotions we allow dogs to express (like anger or assertiveness) align with traits society has historically permitted in men but punished in women, Whitney explains. “For example, anger in dogs is praised (‘He’s protective!’), while cats’ anger is trivialized (‘She’s having a hissy fit’),” Whitney says. This helps explain why dogs are subconsciously filed under “male” in our collective imagination.

How did the “Man’s Best Friend” stereotype shape this bias? 

Dog trainer Ali Smith, founder of Rebarkable, references the “Disney-dog effect,” where male-coded dogs like Tramp, Bolt, and Scooby-Doo dominate pop culture, while female dogs are rare and often hyper-feminized (like Lady and Perdita).

Beyond the big screen, language plays a role, too. “Even the phrase ‘man’s best friend’ reflects old-social structures where loyalty and leadership qualities were coded as masculine,” Plonchak explains. “The ‘good boy’ popularization might also come into effect here. I definitely hear ‘good boy’ in culture more than ‘good girl’ (which I think is more sexualized?). But ultimately, it likely comes down to the fact we’re a patriarchal society — like most things.”

Why do we feel the need to gender our pets... at all?

Humans naturally anthropomorphize — it’s how we make sense of the world. “Humans find it very comfortable to attribute human qualities to non-human beings,” Plonchak says. “It helps us connect emotionally with animals. Assigning a gender feels more familiar, and we tend to relate to them more easily.”

But this habit runs deeper than we think, Plonchak adds: “Calling a dog ‘he’ or ‘she’ seems like nothing, but it shows our tendency to see everything through a gendered lens.”

Those labels even shape how we read our dogs’ personalities. “People often assume boy dogs will be stronger and bolder and girls will be quieter and calmer,” Smith says. “But in my experience, boy dogs are often goofballs, and girls are more serious.”

That being said, Smith prefers to focus on the individual dog, rather than their gender. “Individual is far, far more important than their reproductive organs when it comes to dogs,” Smith explains. “The only bearing their gender has on their behavior is reproductive — males may tend to roam more or mark more, females may get extra cuddly around their [cycles] — but personality is really shaped by training, environment, and experience.”

Can we unlearn the “good boy” reflex?

As Whitney points out, gendering dogs isn’t a moral flaw. It’s really just a cultural habit. “These kinds of biases actually live in culturally shared assumptions,” she explains. “They don’t necessarily live in people’s personal psychology. It’s as if it’s in the air or in the water more than it’s in you.”

You shouldn’t feel guilty for saying “good boy,” but you should notice the reflex and interrupt it, as Whitney herself has learned to do. “When I noticed myself doing this, I didn’t think, I’m a terrible person. I thought, it’s weird that I do that—what’s going on? So, I started interrupting myself.”

As Plonchak puts it, our language and culture are deeply entwined, and old habits don’t disappear overnight. But awareness matters. Maybe next time you meet a pup, you’ll skip the “good boy” and just say, “Who’s a good dog?”