Are there fewer female pedophiles than male?

[Lamia]

@JRDelirious

Yes, but that could be merely a matter of sensationalism biasing what cases get a lot of attention beyond the local.

It’s not like you do not hear at all of male pedophiles, but ISTM that of late the ones that make national news tend to involve high-visibility childpr0n cases (e.g. Jared Fogle) or particularly horrible extreme incidents. I’ve seen far more male than female suspects mentioned in stories on vulgar molestation/childpr0n/statutory cases in the local papers’ crime pages. Though ocassionally you get a M/F couple joining forces, too.

This is basically what I was going to post, with the addition of some info on sexual abuse by educators that I looked up for a previous thread:

@Lamia

It was surprisingly difficult to find real statistics on this, but I did turn up this 2004 report prepared for the US Department of Education, Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature. The section on sex of offenders begins on p. 24 of the document, p. 32 of the PDF. Seven studies on this subject are discussed, and while the results varied quite a bit all found more male than female offenders. (See Table 8 in the report.) Studies that looked at public records found far more male offenders (from 80% to 96%). In two studies that involved questioning students themselves, the numbers were closer. Both studies found that 57% of offenders were male and 43% female.

Since three-quarters of teachers in US public schools are women (cite), even that 57/43 figure suggests that male educators are far more likely than female educators to sexually abuse students. However, these studies did include sexual abuse by non-teachers who work in schools like principals and counselors, and I couldn’t easily find info on the gender ratio in school employment overall.