Generating data with a given probability in R

Question

I need to create data frame in R with Id and and gender of 50 employees. For that I used this code with gl() function.

gender<-gl(2, 25, label=c("Male", "Female"))
id<-1:50
df <- data.frame(id, gender)

But the problem here is the first 25 rows are "male" and the next 25 rows are "female". I want to generate gender randomly with a 50% chance for each gender. Is there anyway to do it in R?

Answer 1

You probably want sample()

gender <- sample(c("Male", "Female"), size=50, replace=TRUE)

You can also do things like create a vector in random order with exactly 25 males and females

sample(rep(c("Male","Female"),each=25)

or get proportions other than 50/50

sample(c("Male", "Female"), size=50, replace=TRUE, prob=c(0.75,0.25))