When it comes to meat, does the sex of the animal make a difference? When we eat chicken, is it always female, or do we eat roosters as well? Same with beef, does it matter whether the cattle were male or female?
I believe both are eaten, but quality varies. Your basic supermarket chicken is usually female, but some male chickens are castrated and raised as capons, which are supposed to be more tender and tasty. I don’t know what happens to washed up breeding roosters.
Most high quality beef comes from steers–again castrated males. I imagine female beef cattle and male and female dairy cattle are used as well, but I don’t know what specifically how.
Most beef is from steers, since you only need a handful for breeding purposes, and they don’t have any other use (such as milk production) besides beef and sperm. They’re usually rather fat, since they’re sold by weight. Dairy cows are slaughtered after they’ve outlived their usfulness, but the meat is usually considered to be too low in fat. McDonald’s uses a mixture of lean dairy meat and excess steer fat in their burgers, which allows them to both get their meat cheaper and to regulate the fat content of wha they serve (walking the line between “healthy” and “tasty”.
I don’t know about chickens, but I suspect that a similar cost-benefit relationship applies: At any given time, you need far more live hens than live roosters.
I’m very disappointed by the misleading thread title. 
Oh well.
In the U.S., unaltered adult male domestic animals (i.e., those that haven’t been castrated) are rarely eaten. It is my understanding that males are more often eaten in other parts of the world (Italy comes to mind for some reason). If memory serves, unaltered males are supposed to have tough meat that has a somewhat different flavor.
The majority of wild venison eaten in this country is male.
Yeah, I was expecting some particularly perverted take on an episode of “Cow and Chicken” …
Remember, if you are running a beef operation you will be generally be raising a different breed of cattle (Angus, Hereford, …) than you will if you are running a dairy operation (Holstein, Guernsey, …).
As indicated, if you’re raising beef, you need the females to keep producing more calves, but you only need a few bulls. The bull calves are castrated and become your main product.
Dairy farmers have little use for bull calves, which they generally sell immediately. Some veal is produced from dairy breeds. I grew up around dairy farms, and you would occasionally find somebody raising a Holstein steer for meat for their own table - the average dairy farmer would be more than happy to sell you a castrated bull calf.
In either case, by the time a female cow has outlived its usefulness, it’s going to be a lousy grade of meat, but is utilized.
Grades of chickens:
You will note that legally, at least, broilers / fryers / roasters can refer to either sex. A castrated male is a capon, and generally labelled as such. Chickens that you buy in the supermarket will be young.
Most livestock is slaughtered for food at the earliest possible age - you don’t want to keep buying or raising feed for the critter after it isn’t going to grow much more.