I think you have to separate heads and data of a table.

your current structure is problematic, because HoHs are unsorted and you can't distinguish what the row/column headers are

{ 
   columns  => { Male  => 0, Female  => 1 }, 
   rows     => { "0-9" => 0, "10-19" => 1, "20-29" => 2 },
   data     => [
                  [220, 175, 260],
                  [180, 142, 265]
               ]
}
[download]

(untested)

You need to look-up indices to get the data now.

This could be encapsulated in a tied hash or an object class.¹

"Age Group" makes it a bit more complicated, not sure what it is, how would you call it?

Maybe a "CATEGORY" field of the rows?

I hope you get the point and this helps. :)

PS: pretty sure someone will come up with a CPAN² module now... :)

update

¹) for instance you could bless the hash above into a class My::Table . Then $obj->rows returns a list of names, and $obj->entry("Male","0-9") returns the entry, and so on.

²) like Data::Table