Couple of thoughts.

In between your ) and -- enter a ,

May want to reference a cell with the date rather than hard-coding it into
your formula. Formulas don't do dates like that very well.

"becknarr" wrote:

I am trying to count the number of "males" within a certain date.

When I first started, I only had one date to pick from, so my formula was:
=COUNTIF(E8:E56,"M")

But now that I have multiple dates to choose from I tried using this function:
=SUMPRODUCT(--(M8:M56="10/2/2008")--(E8:E56="M"))

Any suggestions?