How Many Female Psychopaths Are There?

Art by K. Ramsland

Some recent headlines featured claims by Clive Boddy from Anglia Ruskin University that there are more female psychopaths than originally believed—a lot more.

It's true that bias toward males in the early psychopathy studies resulted in the neglect of females with this disorder. Until the past decade, most research on psychopathy used male participants, assuming either that female psychopaths were too few to study or that the findings from males would transfer to females. These notions failed to play out. Both genders can lack empathy and remorse, but being female does influence how a psychopath might process information, make decisions, and behave.

The development of psychopathy is a complex interaction of biology and environment. The “born” psychopath is considered in some constructs to be a primary type, showing distinct neurological deficits and emotional blunting. The secondary type includes reactive behavior, often a result of conditions like deprivation and abuse. This latter type shows early onset of misconduct, greater substance use, more mental health problems, and more impulsive behavior.

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is the most validated diagnostic instrument for psychopathy. It translates the condition into a configuration of scores derived from 20 traits and behaviors. The PCL-R has also been validated for assessing psychopathy in females.

“[Female] scores are a few points lower than for male offenders,” says the instrument’s inventor, Robert Hare. “But otherwise, the distributions of scores are similar. The correlates and the predictive power of the PCL-R are much the same for female and male offenders.”

The PCL-R items organize around two factors, with two facets in each. Interpersonal and affective components (Factor 1) include traits like grandiosity, callousness, manipulativeness, and a lack of remorse. Factor 2 refers to lifestyle and antisocial behaviors, such as being aggressive, impulsive, and irresponsible. Females with higher psychopathy scores show deficits in conceptual reasoning, flexibility, and problem-solving.

Many researchers estimate the male/female ratio at 6 to 1 (or higher). Boddy thinks that’s wildly inaccurate. He argues the ratio is more like 1.2 to 1, so he calculates up to five times more female psychopaths than we've realized. Yet a search for Boddy’s evidence shows that he relied on a subset of items on the Levinson Self Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP). This 26-item instrument lets people evaluate themselves, and it's been criticized for being vulnerable to memory lapses and personal bias.

Yet even if the LSRP stacks up diagnostically to clinically directed scales, it’s still important to see how Boddy collects and analyzes his data in order to compare his claims to the wider pool of research on female psychopathy. Who was in his subject pool? How many? Are they representative of the larger population? The best I could find was this from Neuroscience News: Focusing on only the first part of the LSRP, Boddy found that 23 percent of men and 12 to 13 percent of women exhibit enough psychopathic traits to be considered a concern for society.

Yet people might behave in a psychopathic manner without being diagnosable as psychopaths.

It’s not as if there no research on female psychopaths. In fact, the past decade has seen quite a lot. Hare devised the PCL: SV, or Screening Version, slimmed down to 12 items that yield the same factor structure as the PCL-R. Using it, a 2015 study with 343 non-forensic female subjects showed higher psychopathy scores on the interpersonal dimension (manipulative, grandiose, charming).

Some researchers prefer the 64-item Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (SRP), especially for large-sample studies. Craig Neumann and his colleagues used a version of it to measure the prevalence of psychopathic traits in more than 19,000 females across eleven world regions. They found consistency in scores across cultures.

Then there's the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI), a diagnostic instrument based on 56 items that focus on fearless dominance and impulsive antisociality. Falkenbach et al. used it to investigate gender differences in archival records of 303 undergraduates (61 percent female). They found no differences between high-scoring males and females on affective deficits (callousness) and instrumental aggression, although females exhibited more dramatic and unstable emotions.

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Male and female psychopaths share several overlapping traits and behaviors: unmotivated lying, self-centered manipulation, a lack of remorse, and a tendency to exploit. Violent male psychopaths behave badly at a younger age than females, and they usually target strangers. A meta-analysis of 53 studies involving female psychopaths found a relationship between the interpersonal facet and proactive or indirect aggression, especially aimed at people they know. So, females tend to target associates or relatives.

Researchers at the Mind Research Network in New Mexico found that learning impairments in psychopaths are related to specific brain areas that process moral concepts and emotional expressions. Eighty-three college students from England completed the SRP:4 scale. The study confirmed that aberrant functioning of the prefrontal cortex influenced the link between affective psychopathic traits and reactive aggression.

“Our published data suggest that, at least in high-risk juvenile females, [callous unemotional and conduct disorder] traits look very similar as we see in boys,” the researchers wrote. Both sexes show reduced gray matter in paralimbic regions.

So, there's been more focus on female psychopaths, but none of these researchers claims that this population has been as underrepresented as Boddy does. His data analysis should be compared against others before we so readily accept his statement.

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