Although the results of an informal net survey and the composition of an e-mail support mailing list for self-injurers don't show quite as strong a female bias as Conterio's numbers do (the survey population turned out to be about 85/15 percent female, and the list is closer to 67/34 percent), it is clear that women tend to resort to this behavior more often than men do. Miller (1994) is undoubtedly onto something with her theories about how women are socialized to internalize anger and men to externalize it. It is also possible that because men are socialized to repress emotion, they may have less trouble keeping things inside when overwhelmed by emotion or externalizing it in seemingly unrelated violence.
As early as 1985, Barnes recognized that gender role expectations played a significant role in how self-injurious patients were treated. Her study showed only two statistically significant diagnoses among self-harmers who were seen at a general hospital in Toronto: women were much more likely to receive a diagnosis of "transient situational disturbance" and men were more likely to be diagnosed as substance abusers. Overall, about a quarter of both men and women in this study were diagnosed with personality disorder.
Barnes suggests that men who self-injure get taken more "seriously" by physicians; only 3.4 percent of the men in the study were considered to have transient and situational problems, as compared to 11.8 percent of the women.
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