Comparing the Sexual Offending Perpetrated and Punishment Received by Women and Men in the State of New York

Using a census of all individuals publicly registered on the New York State sex offender registry on 11/26/25 (n = 27,344), this study compared the sexual offending of female perpetrators (n = 427; 1.56%) with male perpetrators (n = 26,916; 98.43%) as well as the criminal justice outcomes that they received. Specifically, perpetrator demographics, victim characteristics, types of sexual violence, type of sentence, length of sentence, and sex offender registry related outcomes were compared for the index sex offenses of male and female perpetrators. This study also aimed to see if female perpetrators would receive more lenient sentence types and sentence lengths than their male counterparts, while controlling for specific offense characteristics using 1:1 pairing of female perpetrators to male perpetrators. Results indicated that male and female perpetrated sex offenses were more similar than dissimilar, and that female perpetrators were more likely to avoid incarceration than their male counterparts.