To be fair, the male/female nomenclature for connectors has been a mess for decades.
One old convention, mostly originating with radio-frequency connectors, is that the gender of the connector is the gender of its innermost contact. Thus, the plug of the common 2.5" and 2.1" connector of power supplies is technically female because the inner contact is a hole. The socket on the appliance has a pin in the middle and is technically male. When you try to buy one, half the time the part is labelled as male and the other half it is labelled as female.
But there is no problem bad enough that cannot be made worse by government. Years ago some US regulator didn't like the fact that people were plugging big radio antennas into wifi equipment, so they invented the "reverse-polarity" connector. What used to be a "SMA male" connector with a pin in the middle now is a "RP SMA male" connector with a hole in the middle. Here is a random link with a picture: http://cablesondemandblog.com/wordpress1/2014/05/05/reverse_... If you order this kind of connectors, now you have a 25% chance of getting what you need. One RP SMA male and a SMA female will mate together but not propagate any signals.
One old convention, mostly originating with radio-frequency connectors, is that the gender of the connector is the gender of its innermost contact. Thus, the plug of the common 2.5" and 2.1" connector of power supplies is technically female because the inner contact is a hole. The socket on the appliance has a pin in the middle and is technically male. When you try to buy one, half the time the part is labelled as male and the other half it is labelled as female.
But there is no problem bad enough that cannot be made worse by government. Years ago some US regulator didn't like the fact that people were plugging big radio antennas into wifi equipment, so they invented the "reverse-polarity" connector. What used to be a "SMA male" connector with a pin in the middle now is a "RP SMA male" connector with a hole in the middle. Here is a random link with a picture: http://cablesondemandblog.com/wordpress1/2014/05/05/reverse_... If you order this kind of connectors, now you have a 25% chance of getting what you need. One RP SMA male and a SMA female will mate together but not propagate any signals.