JQuery :: Filter Portfolio With Checkboxes?

I wish to display a list of people on my website. These people are speakers who have different talents, or features. Male, female, high voice, low voice, german, english, persian, austrian ... a whole bunch of people. And I want to let my user use checkboxes to narrow down the speakers he could use for his production.

Here's the output filtering list (not complete, just rudimentary while I try to make it work)

<div id="filter">
<form>
<input name="speakerpool" class="checkfilter" type="checkbox" value="male" checked /> male<br>

[Code].....

My problem : I want to start with all checkboxes selected, showing all the people in this speakerpool, then narrow down as checkboxes get unchecked. This works well with combinations such as ".male .voice-low" which effectively removes all females and the other voices, I found here where I learned that is(".class1,.class2") is different to is(".class1.class2")

But, if I say, I want all english speakers, no matter if male or female, and I check male and female, I get none, since there is no speaker that is both male and female. At least not that I know of

Same issue with the voice-levels: most speakers either speak high or low or medium, yet I'd want to be able to check all those and get a comprehensive list, then.

My Question : Is there a way I can separate classes into class-groups or something? Maybe use prefixes like "sex-male, sex-female, language-english, language-german" and jQuery then uses the prefixes to check if they're supposed to be additive (?) or exlusive.