taking a random sample

[Denise Vella]

Hi i would like to take a random sample from my dataset, however I have
gender === 1 ///male 200,000 observations
gender == 0 ///female 5,000 observations

Is there a way that if I take a random sample I would have fair representation of male & female ?
what I don't want is stata to remove all the females for eg

sample 20,500

[Daniel Schaefer]

Seems like you want the by option.

sample 20, by(gender)

I'm not sure what 500 is doing there, but it doesn't appear to be valid syntax.

Edit: there are a lot of ways to take a random sample. That will stratify by gender. Let us know if you want something else - e.g. sampling with a probability weighted by gender.