Tobacco kills approximately 5 million people worldwide each year, including 66,000 in France, making it a major cause of preventable death. To understand the current situation and predict what will happen in the coming years, we need reliable data on tobacco use by gender. Indeed, these are the only data that allow us to understand trends in the incidence of tobacco-related diseases, broken down by gender. Tobacco sales data and data from surveys of representative samples for a number of developed countries have been compiled. French data were published recently; they are updated in another article in the same issue of the journal. Sales data are reliable but are not broken down by sex; survey data are available by sex but are not compatible with sales data: some surveys significantly underestimate consumption, while others overestimate it. Here, we present for the first time cigarette sales data by gender, obtained by adjusting the survey data to make them compatible with the sales data. Until now, consumption by gender has been studied based on the percentages of smokers reported in surveys. (R.A.)