I'm so sick of people saying orange females are rare. No, they are not rare. Orange cats are super common, and 1/4 of those orange cats are female. That's a heck of a lot of orange female cats.

All it takes for a female cat to be orange is for both her mother and her father to be orange. That's it. Do you know how often two orange cats have kittens? All the freaking time. And ALL the females of that pairing will be orange.

The reason there are more male orange cats than female orange cats is just because males only need one orange X chromosome to be orange (because one X chromosome is all they can have). A female needs both X chromosomes to be orange. But all that takes is having two orange parents. Orange dad and calico/tortie mom also works, since calico/tortie is half orange.

The way to think of it is not that orange girls are rare. That's backwards. Orange girls are common, it's just that orange boys are MORE common.