Co-ed groups

A group is co-ed when its lineup includes at least one man and one woman. Size does not matter. AKMU, a brother and sister who won the audition show K-pop Star 2 and debuted under YG Entertainment in 2014, counts the same as a ten-member group.¹

Units built from members of different groups count too. Cube Entertainment paired Hyunseung of Beast with HyunA of 4Minute as Trouble Maker in 2011,² and in 2017 put HyunA together with Hui and E'Dawn of Pentagon as Triple H.³ A one-off collaboration or a featured artist on a single does not make a group co-ed.

Cool and Roo'ra both debuted in 1994 with men and women sharing the vocals,⁴⁵ and Koyote followed in 1998.⁶ From the 2000s on, new co-ed groups became far less common than girl groups and boy bands.⁷

The groups that did try often ended up split along gender lines. Core Contents Media launched Co-Ed School in 2010 with four women and six men, then divided it into the all-female F-ve Dolls in 2011 and the all-male SPEED in 2012.⁸ YG Entertainment's 2017 audition show Mixnine put men and women through the same program but ended with separate boys' and girls' teams. The boys won, and their debut was cancelled in 2018 over contract disputes.⁹

Researchers mostly point to marketing. Sociologist John Lie ties the shift to the industry leaning harder on gender archetypes, and Roald Maliangkay argues that a group pitched at a specific male or female audience is easier to sell, which is why mixed groups barely exist.⁷

Relationships inside the lineup are a risk single-gender groups do not carry in the same way. Triple H ended in 2018 after HyunA and E'Dawn confirmed they were dating without Cube's approval and the agency moved to drop them both.³

DSP Media released three project singles from KARD between December 2016 and April 2017 before the group officially debuted with Hola Hola on July 19, 2017.¹⁰ THEBLACKLABEL debuted AllDay Project, three women and two men, on June 23, 2025 with Famous, and the group won its first music show on M Countdown ten days later.¹¹

A group's type comes from its members. If every member with a recorded gender is a woman it is a girl group, if every one is a man it is a boy band, and if both appear, former members included, it is co-ed. Editors can change the type when the member data is incomplete. Co-ed groups show Co-ed Group in lavender above their name, and that label links to this page.

The lists on this page come from those groups. If one is missing or misfiled, suggest an edit on its profile.