I have always been a cat person having grown up with a family who seemed to collect them and there was always at least one or two in the house at all times. After getting married, my own cat was the second most important thing I brought into my new life. Since then, there has been only a few short instances during the more than 30 years we have been together we have not had a cat; usually the brief time between losing one and adopting another.
For about half that time we were only a single cat household, until we inherited a relative's then it became two which we continued to maintain until the day number three followed us home and invited herself in. Though we swore after losing our senior cat at the beginning of the year, we would keep it at two, but damned if those plans didn't last long. Guess we will just have to maintain it at the trifecta for now.
I have never owned a dog and could never see myself doing so. It's not that I hate them as so much as I really don't care for them. To me cats have always held fascination and are nature's perfect creature. As an animal, cats are the perfect independent, question authority, non-conformist who have to want to be around you to be around you. They will give you the time of day when they feel like it and when they don't, they will do their own thing. In short, I think cats are more of a match for my personality as I can understand where they are coming from. Dogs are too willing to bow down to authority and blindly do whatever the Alpha tells them to do. As a political liberal, they seem too Republican for me. Additionally dogs give something for a human to command, while cats bring out humans' maternal instinct more and I much rather care for an animal like a parent than dominate it as its leader.
As far as gender, almost all the cats we have had were male (including two of our current ones), the exceptions being the one we lost back in March and one of the current ones. We never deliberately chose cats for gender; it's just how it worked out. Though I do admit for some reason I always felt more of an emotional attachment to the two female ones; particularly the one we lost and there are days I still feel devastated by her death.
Can't really answer what would happen in a relationship with a dog person, since my wife fortunately loves cats almost as much as me. Though I do find it strange our kids turned out to be dog-people and would never own a cat.
Here are our current three...with the boys on either end and little girl in the middle. The first is the newest we took in and middle-age, the second the youngest and the third the senior cat.