Women Who Kill

A large gender gap in homicide offending exists, with men being responsible for most homicides in the United States. Overall, women commit a disproportionately small number of homicides: in 2015 just 11% of all known homicide offenders were women, and this percentage has been stable for the past 40 years. While the gender gap in homicide offending is evident, women commit homicide in different contexts than men. For example, there are differences in victim–offender relationships and differences in the motives for killing. Moreover, traditional criminological theories of homicide did not usually address the role of gender and, as a result, were less effective in explaining women's offending than men's offending. Researchers studying the gendered nature of women's offending have found that as women's social and economic resources expanded, the rate of women's homicide offending declined. Incorporating gender into research and theorizing about women's homicide offending will allow scholars to understand the contexts better of women who kill.