Why Female Psychopathy Can Be So Difficult To Spot, According To Researchers

For more than 20 years, Fiona Girkin kept seeing a workplace pattern she could not easily explain. Certain colleagues could appear warm, charming and supportive when they first arrived, yet months later people around them described manipulation, isolation and serious psychological harm. The problem was that raising concerns could backfire. Without a clear framework for describing what was happening, the person making the complaint could quickly become the problem instead.

Girkin eventually decided to investigate what she had spent years observing. Her research raised uncomfortable questions about how psychopathic traits are identified, whether existing assessment tools are biased toward male behaviour, and why harmful manipulation can remain hidden when it does not involve violence or obvious criminality. The evidence does not prove that women are as likely as men to be psychopaths, but it does suggest researchers may still be missing important parts of the picture.

A Workplace Pattern That Left People Devastated

Working with Dr Sharyn Curran at Curtin University, Girkin interviewed 13 people from Tasmania’s welfare sector and asked them to describe colleagues whose behaviour had caused harm. Eleven participants identified at least one person they believed displayed eight or more psychopathic traits. Together, they identified 47 colleagues, including 36 women and 11 men. The behaviours described were often subtle rather than physically aggressive. Participants spoke about gaslighting, gossip that isolated targets, carefully cultivated friendships with managers and workplace situations allegedly designed to make certain employees fail.

The consequences described by participants were far from subtle. Some said they sat in their cars crying before they could bring themselves to enter the workplace, while others eventually left the welfare sector completely. Girkin said several women reported reaching a point where they attempted to take their own lives because of their experiences. She has also been careful not to present the research as a tool for casually diagnosing people. As she explained, the focus is on identifying behaviours that may be psychopathic in nature rather than declaring that a particular person is a psychopath.

The study was small and focused on one professional sector in one Australian state, so it cannot establish how common psychopathy is among women or diagnose the people described by participants. What it does provide is a detailed look at how some forms of manipulation may operate in ordinary workplaces, particularly when the person accused of causing harm has already built a strong reputation with colleagues or management.

• Gaslighting: Targets were allegedly pushed to question their own memory and interpretation of events.
• Social isolation: Gossip and relationship-building were reportedly used to separate certain people from workplace support.
• Reputation management: Some participants described alleged efforts to build trust with managers before complaints were made.
• Setting people up to fail: Work and leave arrangements were allegedly handled in ways that increased pressure on particular employees.

The Main Psychopathy Test Has A Major Limitation

The debate begins with one of the most widely known tools used to assess psychopathy. The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, developed by Canadian psychologist Robert Hare, contains 20 items and has long been considered an important assessment instrument in the field. Its origins, however, have become part of the controversy surrounding how psychopathy is understood across different populations because the tool was initially developed through research involving male prison populations.

Forensic psychologist Joni E. Johnston has pointed to that history when discussing why female psychopathy may be more difficult to identify. Clive Boddy of Anglia Ruskin University has made a similar argument, suggesting that assessment methods tied closely to criminal behaviour and traditionally masculine expressions of antisocial conduct may fail to capture people who show exploitative or callous traits differently. A person who never commits a violent crime or openly threatens another individual may still engage in behaviour that causes serious damage to those around them.

That does not mean every difficult colleague, manipulative partner or unpleasant person should be described as psychopathic. Psychopathy is a complex construct that requires careful assessment, and the research community continues to debate how it should be measured. The central concern is narrower: if the tools were developed around a particular population, researchers need to know whether those tools perform equally well when applied to people whose behaviour and social roles may look different.

Different methods can produce dramatically different estimates of how common psychopathy is. That makes the choice of assessment tool more than a technical detail. It can influence who researchers identify, which behaviours receive attention and how large the apparent gender gap becomes.

The Same Behaviour May Be Given Different Labels

Johnston has argued that gender can influence how manipulative or superficially charming behaviour is interpreted. She wrote that a female offender displaying those traits might be described as “histrionic” or “borderline,” while a male offender showing similar characteristics could be more readily associated with psychopathy. Those terms are not interchangeable diagnoses, and they should never be used casually. Her point concerns the possibility that observers can interpret similar conduct through very different expectations about gender.

That distinction may have serious consequences in workplaces and other social environments. A man who appears cold, calculating or aggressively manipulative may fit a familiar cultural stereotype of psychopathy. A woman displaying comparable behaviour may instead be viewed as emotionally unstable, dramatic or simply difficult. Once a behaviour is placed into a less threatening category, the people affected by it may struggle to persuade others that something more serious is happening.

The problem becomes even harder when the alleged behaviour takes place behind closed doors or through social relationships rather than obvious acts of violence. A person may be charming to managers, helpful to selected colleagues and deeply unpleasant to a particular target. Those conflicting experiences can create a credibility problem for the person making the complaint because others have seen an entirely different side of the same individual.

Calling someone difficult can end a conversation before anyone examines the details. It can also flatten a complicated situation into an ordinary personality clash, even when one person believes there is a deliberate pattern of manipulation. That possibility is one reason researchers are examining whether existing stereotypes leave certain harmful behaviours hidden in plain sight.

Some Researchers Say Women May Use Different Tactics

Boddy, who has studied psychopathy in organisational settings since 2005, believes public assumptions about gender play a significant role in how these traits are recognised. He has argued that people often associate psychopathic characteristics more readily with men, even when women display traits such as deceitfulness, antagonism, insincerity and a lack of emotional depth. If observers expect a psychopath to behave in a traditionally masculine way, someone using a different set of tactics may never fit the mental picture.

Boddy has also argued that female psychopaths may be more likely to use words and social relationships rather than physical violence to achieve their aims. That argument remains part of a wider scientific debate, but it helps explain why workplace settings have become an important area of interest. Physical aggression is easy to identify. Manipulation through gossip, reputation-building, selective kindness and social exclusion can be much harder to prove.

This is also where the popular image of psychopathy may cause problems. Films and crime stories have trained many people to picture someone visibly threatening or obviously detached from normal human relationships. In reality, researchers who study psychopathic traits have repeatedly discussed charm and social manipulation as possible characteristics. A person who appears pleasant and trustworthy may therefore escape suspicion far more easily than someone who openly behaves badly.

Psychologist Abigail Marsh has noted that people often underestimate how useful kindness and charm can be to someone trying to get something from others. Her observation cuts directly against the belief that dangerous or manipulative personalities always look cold from the beginning. In many situations, the ability to appear friendly may be exactly what allows harmful behaviour to remain hidden.

The Claim About Equal Numbers Remains Unproven

The most controversial part of this debate concerns prevalence. Traditional estimates have generally found psychopathy to be considerably more common among men than women, with some figures placing the difference at several men for every woman. Boddy has argued that the gap could be much smaller if researchers removed items heavily associated with criminal behaviour and focused more closely on primary psychopathic traits.

He has suggested that future research using different methods could produce a ratio closer to 1.14 men for every woman. That number has attracted attention because it challenges the long-standing assumption that female psychopathy is rare. However, it remains an argument about what future research may reveal rather than an established population finding.

The lack of large, representative studies makes any precise global estimate difficult. Boddy has acknowledged that there are very few large studies measuring psychopathy in random samples of the general adult population. Without that evidence, claims that the true rate is close to equal remain speculative.

What The Largest Review Found

A systematic review pooling 15 studies and 11,497 adults demonstrated how heavily the result can depend on the assessment method used. The overall prevalence was reported at 4.5%, but the figure dropped to 1.2% when checklist-based measures were used and rose to 5.4% under self-report measures.

The same review found a higher prevalence among men, at 7.9%, compared with 2.9% among women. That finding does not support a one-to-one ratio. It does, however, reinforce the argument that measurement choices can substantially alter the numbers researchers produce.

The most accurate conclusion is therefore more restrained than the headline claims often suggest. There is a serious debate about whether existing tools are equally effective across genders. There is far less evidence for any exact claim that women and men experience psychopathy at identical rates.

Why Victims May Struggle To Be Believed

Hedwig Eisenbarth of Victoria University of Wellington has also discussed differences in how antisocial behaviour can appear among women and men. When a form of harmful behaviour clashes with public expectations, the person experiencing it may face an additional hurdle: convincing others that it happened at all.

That problem becomes particularly severe when the alleged manipulator has already established strong relationships with the people who hold influence. A manager may know someone as helpful and professional. Another employee may know the same person through an entirely different experience involving exclusion, deception or psychological pressure. Both accounts can feel completely real to the people telling them.

The result can leave the target isolated. They may begin questioning their own interpretation, especially when colleagues refuse to recognise the behaviour they describe. That does not prove every allegation of manipulation is accurate, but it explains why researchers are interested in the social conditions that allow psychological harm to remain difficult to document.

People are often prepared to recognise a threat when it arrives loudly. Quiet manipulation creates a different problem because there may be no single dramatic incident that proves what is happening. Instead, the damage may emerge through dozens of small interactions that are difficult to explain individually but form a pattern when viewed together.

Fiona Girkin Spent Years Looking For Answers

Girkin’s research does not settle the scientific argument over female psychopathy. Her study was too small to answer questions about prevalence, and the people described by participants were not clinically diagnosed through the research. Those limitations matter, particularly when a term as serious and widely misunderstood as psychopathy is involved.

Yet the research has helped focus attention on a question that deserves closer examination: what happens when the people researchers are trying to identify do not resemble the population used to build the original measuring tool? If an assessment is especially good at recognising one expression of harmful behaviour, other expressions may receive less attention.

For the people who spent years struggling to describe what they believed was happening to them, that gap can have consequences long before researchers agree on the statistics. Better research will require larger population studies, clearer comparisons between assessment methods and far more caution around sensational claims. Until then, the strongest finding may be the simplest one: harmful behaviour does not always arrive looking the way people expect it to.

Sources:

• Sanz-García, A., Gesteira, C., Sanz, J., & García-Vera, M. P. (2021). Prevalence of Psychopathy in the General Adult Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 661044. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661044
• International developments in applied psychology and business management. (n.d.). In International Association for Technology, Education and Language Studies, Conference Proceedings of APBM 2024. IATELS. https://www.drfionagirkin.com/_files/ugd/5bdfc8_1ac3ed6369b24a5cb68b3b765af9bbe8.pdf?