Korean pop culture, in numbers

Only 12 of 379 Korean groups have both men and women

Wikidata lists the members of 428 Korean music groups. For 379 of them at least one member has a sex recorded, so the group can be sorted. Of those, 12 have both men and women — 3.2% — and the rest split almost evenly: 185 all-men and 182 all-women.

12 is a floor, not a total. 127 of the groups we sorted still contain a member whose sex Wikidata does not record. Any one of those could turn out to be co-ed, which would move the count up but never down. We print the floor and the size of the gap rather than a single tidy number.

The three buckets, and the 49 we could not sort

Group makeupGroupsShare of sorted
All men18548.8%
All women18248%
Both men and women123.2%
No sex recorded for anyone49not sorted
Every Korean music group on Wikidata428379 sorted

The last row is left out of every share above. A group with nothing recorded is not evidence of anything, so it is counted separately rather than folded into the men column.

The 12 groups with both, largest first

GroupMenWomenSex not recorded
AllDay Project23
Jaurim31
KARD22
Cool21
Us12
Banana Girl12
Moogadang211
Triple H21
SSAK321
AKMU11
A-Force11
Trouble Maker11

Ordered by how many members have a sex recorded, not by fame — we hold no measure of fame to order them by. Some of these are rock bands rather than idol groups; see below.

Where we refuse to give a number

We do not say why co-ed groups are rare. Nothing in this data distinguishes an industry that makes few of them from an encyclopedia that records them less often. Both would produce the same table, and we cannot tell them apart, so we describe the table and stop.

We do not separate bands from idol groups. Wikidata files both under the same member property. Splitting them would mean us deciding what counts as an idol group, which is a judgement, not a reading — so the rows stay mixed and this note stays here.

What we wrote from this data

Where these numbers come from, and what they cannot answer

Korean groups we track · Group members by birth year · How we count