Sort a file but keep row pairs together

You mean like this?

$ sort -t, -k1,1 -k2,2n file female,8,14,2.4181574607 female,9,13,6.3152956461 female,9,14,4.5933365997 female,11,11,3.6421699174 female,12,12,5.4797699786 

This will sort ,-delimited data on the first field alphabetically, then on the second field numerically. The sorting will first sort using the first field, and for records that have identical first fields, the second field will be used for sorting.

To remove the last few columns afterwards (or rather, keep columns 1 and 2):

$ sort -t, -k1,1 -k2,2n file | cut -d, -f1,2 female,8 female,9 female,9 female,11 female,12 

To remove that comma too:

$ sort -t, -k1,1 -k2,2n file | cut -d, -f1,2 | tr ',' ' ' female 8 female 9 female 9 female 11 female 12 

But this is not needed for the sorting, obviously, as you may tell sort what delimiter to use.

Try this:

awk 'BEGIN {FS=","} {print $1, $2}' file | sort -k1,1 -nk2,2 

Explanation:

1. 'BEGIN {FS=","} {print $1, $2}' - set up field separator to , (space by default) and print only first ($1) and second ($2) fields;
2. file - you file (you can use pipe instead: cat file | awk etc...);
3. sort -k1,1 -nk2,2 - sort by first field (-k1,1) and the next step - sort by second field numerically (-nk2,2)

Lets complicate your example (actually your first fields are equal). Suppose you have different input file like this:

male,9,13,6.3152956461 female,12,12,5.4797699786 female,11,11,3.6421699174 male,9,14,4.5933365997 male,8,14,2.4181574607 

Output will:

male 8 male 9 male 9 female 11 female 12 

Is this what you need?