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Its an objective fact among every country that publishes crime statistics. These countries all vary widely in every other metric you can imagine (social, economic, political etcetera). But, crime being disproportionately commited by men is a universal constant. Nobody has an objectively correct answer to this question, it's just a prompt for discussion. Share your opinion, whatever it may be. However, please don't be a dick to other commenters. Disagreement, good faith, many view points and discussion is the goal here.

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[-] Baggie@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago

There's certainly a social competent, crimes, violence is seen as a manly trait.

Testosterone is also a hell of a drug, it makes you do stupid shit.

There might be underreporting of the women circumstantially as well. I mention this because the only people that have committed violence against me is my mother and my ex. I feel like if they were men the possibility of criminal charges might have happened instead of being ignored, but that's a unknown.

[-] Kaligalis@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago

For violent crimes it's probably just that men are on average stronger and more aggressive (at least they were a few decades ago).
For white collar crimes, higher positions with more criminal opportunity still are usually held by men. More opportunity means more abuse of opportunity.
On the low economic end, poor men are less likely to be able to benefit from help for internal and external reasons than poor women. So survival crimes are more likely to be done by men, too.
Men on average seem to also feel more the need for speed and are more risk affine. So they likely get more speeding tickets.

Different reasons for different types of crimes. There probably are also crimes that are more often committed by women or where the gender gap is insignificant. But nobody talks about crimes committed by women. So no idea whether women are even capable of committing crimes at all.

[-] spittingimage@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

Brain worms.

[-] Rooster326@programming.dev 9 points 12 hours ago

Can anyone even measure the amount of crime committed?

Or is it only the crimes caught, and charged in a court of law.

Because they are not the same thing.

[-] Bgugi@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

While I agree with the sentiment, I think the disparity is so vast you can't practically explain it without a substantial underlying difference in the crimes committed.

[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 10 hours ago

Was about to say this.

Men are caught committing more crimes. Most likely because they are dumber than women.

[-] iocase@lemmy.zip 8 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Criminals tend to be on the extreme end of the bell curve for violence, and men's bell curve for violence is slightly shifted up compared to women. In the end, that means the extreme outliers for all the most disagreeable and violent individuals are men (like 99%) and the same is true on the opposite end but for women.

Men also have a slightly broader bell curve for intelligence, so the same applies for the extreme end of intelligence. All of the dumbest people alive are primarily men. The Venn diagram of low intelligence and agreeableness, along with impulsiveness means most criminals are men.

[-] ReticulatedPasta@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

I think we'll need sources for this, it seems pretty subjective

[-] iocase@lemmy.zip 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

There are strong sex based differences in propensity for youth violence in WEIRD countries. There's less of a strong correlation outside of those countries but it still broadly applies when analyzed.

It's more complex than just being "hardwired" or "testosterone" but the differences are statistically significant and repeatable.

There is a strong correlation between intelligence and being a criminal. It's not predictive, but if you have low intelligence you're part of a vulnerable group that is far more likely to be imprisoned. This could also be that smart criminals don't get caught, but large case reviews with low intelligence offenders often find a lack of foresight of what happens after commiting a crime, and a lack of understanding about how serious it can be. Both of which strongly correlate with criminality. It's a fancy way of saying they don't think ahead and don't understand the magnitude of what they're doing.

Within the literature the greater male variability hypothesis is not controversial, but well established fact.

The rest of my opinion is derived from a statistics 101 level of understanding of bell curve comparisons between two groups and what happens to the tails and outliers (which is also backed up piecemeal by my sources in different areas indirectly.)

I'm willing to add more sources as needed but I think it's time you did some searching to refute my position if you still think it's suspect.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

It's not possible to measure committed crimes. If anyone parrots some crime statistics without limiting themselves to violent crimes it's 100% bullshit. Crime statistics just measure convictions. Violent crime rates often times include unsolved murders and assaults.

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[-] Sybilvane@lemmy.ca 15 points 16 hours ago

Women are better are covering it up. I think men are more prone to acts of passion or random bouts of rage, which is difficult to plan for and cover up. It's often public, loud and messy. Women internalize from an early age that this is not acceptable behaviour if you're not male, so we reign it in more. But that doesn't mean the crimes aren't committed, we're just always cognizant of the social fallout if we're discovered.

Anyone who has worked in a retirement home can tell you there are some very sweet ladies who will, on or near their deathbed, tell you how they killed their abusive husband decades ago. Or they share the story like words of wisdom to the younger generation.

I think a lot of women have been put in a corner by society, so they don't feel a pressing need to play by the rules all the time.

[-] Bgugi@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

That's not really a practical answer for a lot of crimes, unless you also presuppose that a large portion of women covering it up are also successfully pinning them on men or preventing them from being discovered at all.

For example in the US, even if you add all unknown murders to women, they're still totaling less than half attributed to men.

[-] sunsofold@lemmy.zip -4 points 6 hours ago

I don't. Your question is leading. Next question.

[-] Return_of_Chippy@lemmy.world 0 points 4 hours ago
[-] sunsofold@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Thank you for revealing yourself. I block children.

[-] lonefighter@sh.itjust.works 17 points 18 hours ago

I think it's social conditioning and lack of mental health resources. Girls are strongly socially conditioned to "play nice" and get along at all costs, which tends to lead to more rules following. Boys are often socialized to suppress their emotions while at the same time are allowed to act out and encouraged to be tough and macho. The bad boy act is romanticized and violence is at best tolerated and at worst idolized.

So you have men who never learned how to deal with their feelings who also are used to having a physical, often violent outlet because that's the only acceptable thing they know.

[-] CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Studies of boys say that boys (in games) will follow the rules at the detriment of individual players and girls (in games) tend to allow the rules to be applied individually. This also explains why boys and girls tend to gravitate to different types of games. The way boys play can lead to acute ostracization if the rule is discriminatory towards you or even if you just happen to get unlucky where girls will often make exceptions to those rules to avoid a peer being ostracized. The boy template is how society currently works, it will inherently create poverty, inequality and the only “winner” is the rules. It’s more than social conditioning, it’s the mindset that society chooses to build its self on that perpetuates the problem.

I sourced this from the book “In a Different Voice” which I don’t have access to right now but the author did cite her sources and body of work if anyone else is curious about how basically all psychological studies on human development are almost exclusively done with boys to the exclusion of everyone else, especially foundational works.

[-] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 12 hours ago

The way boys play can lead to acute ostracization if the rule is discriminatory towards you or even if you just happen to get unlucky where girls will often make exceptions to those rules to avoid a peer being ostracized

Growing up this was not my experience at all with girls. Maybe if you’re neurotypical and/or cis then girls are like that, but I got ostracized by most of my female peers from early elementary school (and the majority of my male peers wouldn’t give me the time of day to begin with because I was a ‘girl’). The ways girls can be cruel to each other for arbitrary reasons is really jaw dropping if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. Maybe it’s different now than it was ~30 years ago, but I’d be surprised if it was. If anything I have to imagine cyber bullying makes it worse.

[-] lonefighter@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 hours ago

My experience as a neurodivergent woman was that as a girl growing up I was very much ostracized from other girls and was mocked and bullied cause I was a little weirdo, but I could usually find a couple boys who were a year or three older than me who would treat me kindly and include me in their games. They didn't treat me quite like an equal but more like a sister they needed to take care of and it was always a safe place for me.

As an adult I've found dynamics are different and I still struggle making friends and relating to people because I never got to have friends as a kid, but I can definitely walk into a group of women and not be bullied and generally can make myself feel included with some social effort.

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[-] NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net 0 points 7 hours ago

Mental instability, hormone imbalances, the internet/manosphere 'culture' (inc susceptibility to psychological manipulation) propensity to violence

Pick one.

[-] endofline@lemmy.ca 11 points 18 hours ago

Men are more likely to face real poverty and get no help from anybody. Suicide, crime rates are just derivatives of it

[-] autriyo@feddit.org 8 points 17 hours ago

How so? What does real poverty entail in your view?

Because to it feels like the odds are mostly even, maybe slightly skewed towards women being more like to face poverty.

But I'm genuinely curious about your point of view.

[-] endofline@lemmy.ca 10 points 17 hours ago
[-] autriyo@feddit.org 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Homelessness is a symptom of poverty, but many people still suffer from poverty without being homeless.

I haven't checked super thoroughly, but the statistics you linked do not make this distinction, as far as I can tell. Maybe there is other reasons for the skew in homelessness than people being in poverty. Maybe your point still stands even after checking if there's actual correlation or not.

(Edit: I just noticed the

and not get help

part of your original post, didn't consider that yet...)

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[-] remotelove@lemmy.ca 27 points 22 hours ago

In most cases, I believe it's a mix of hormones and traditionalism. Men have generally been more likely to seek grandeur by participating in violent activities, or, violent activities are demanded by their particular social group. Sometimes a mix of both.

I think it also it boils down to how gender roles are taught by different cultures. If men are taught to be the risk takers, it only makes sense that boundaries and laws will get pushed more by men. After all, intentionally breaking a law may simply be viewed as a calculated risk and not as something that should never be done.

Honestly speaking, it seems too easy of an answer to just blame male physiology. The social aspects of this can't be ignore either.

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[-] venusaur@lemmy.world 32 points 22 hours ago

Cuz women don’t have the balls to commit crime.

This is a joke.

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[-] Tudsamfa@lemmy.world 16 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

From least to most relevant:

  • There are more crimes that can only be done by men than by women.
  • There are crimes that are taken more seriously by law enforcement when done by men.
  • Male crime bosses are still bosses and unlikely to hire and promote women.
  • Housework may be real but unpaid work, but does not lend itself to workplace crime.
  • Males are more likely to be convicted, skewing statistics.
  • We are teaching kids that being angry or horny are typically male emotions.
  • Seeking help from family or institutions is discouraged for men, while being self reliant is idolized.
  • We stopped prosecuting the crime of witchcraft /s
[-] Bgugi@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I think it's probably fair to say that there was a lot of evolutionary pressure that selected for aggression in males and against it for females. Trying to ignore any biological differences is neglectful.

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[-] Beth@piefed.social 8 points 17 hours ago

Even in more progressive areas boys are socialized differently. I’ve been in a field where I see early childhood until middle school for years now. And girls, from the beginning, and raised more strictly. They have more care in their clothes, their meals, and the skills they are taught. They rarely fight, and if they do, it’s not on impulse. My theory on why people often say “boys are easier” is because they absolutely neglect them. So the onus is on 3rd parties to often teach them basic skills and rule following, to control their impulses, etc. Even in K-5, boys are the ones who are telling their teachers to fuck off, leaving the buildings without permission, fighting, etc. Parents blame the teacher/staff, if they are present at all, and antisocial behavior gets rewarded again and again.

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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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