Are Bisexual Women More Like Men? That Is Not Quite What the Study Found
Thursday, July 18, 2024. Revised and Updated Monday, September 21, 2026.
Science occasionally produces a finding that arrives wearing sensible shoes and is immediately sent onto the internet in a feather boa.
A study of sex, sexual orientation, personality, and sexual behavior found that bisexual and mostly heterosexual women differed from exclusively heterosexual women on several measures. In some respects, their average scores moved in what the researchers called a more “male-typical” direction.
That is interesting.
It does not mean bisexual women have male personalities.
It does not mean bisexuality causes psychopathy.
It does not mean a bisexual partner is unusually likely to cheat.
And it certainly does not mean two thousand Canadian undergraduates have finally solved women.
What it means is narrower, stranger, and more useful.
What the researchers actually studied
The study, published online in 2024 and in the 2025 volume of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, examined 2,047 undergraduates at two Canadian universities: 1,474 women and 573 men, with an average age of about 21.
Participants completed self-report measures covering:
the “Dark Triad” traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy;
sociosexuality, meaning a person’s willingness to consider sex outside a committed relationship;
sexual excitation and sexual inhibition; and
sexual orientation, measured along a Kinsey-style continuum.
Across the sample, men reported higher average Dark Triad scores, greater sexual excitation, and more unrestricted sociosexuality. Women reported greater sexual inhibition, including more concern about consequences such as judgment, rejection, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infections.
None of this describes every man or every woman. Group averages are not personality tests handed down from Sinai.
The finding that earned the headline
Mostly heterosexual and bisexual women showed higher average sociosexuality and sexual excitation than exclusively heterosexual women. They also scored higher on some Dark Triad measures, particularly subclinical psychopathy.
The researchers described certain results as “male-shifted”—a technical comparison to the average male pattern in this particular sample.
The phrase is easy to sensationalize. It does not mean that bisexual women are psychologically male, secretly masculine, or deficient in womanhood.
Even more important, the pattern was not a tidy straight line running from heterosexual to homosexual. Sociosexuality and sexual excitation showed a curvilinear, inverted-U pattern, especially among women. The highest scores often appeared among mostly heterosexual and bisexual participants, not exclusively homosexual participants.
So the real finding is not that sexual orientation sits on one clean ruler. It may be that different patterns of attraction have different correlates and possibly different developmental pathways.
Human sexuality, having declined every previous invitation to become simple, has declined again.
“Psychopathy” is doing too much work here
The word psychopathy lands with all the delicacy of a piano dropped from a window. Most readers hear violence, remorselessness, or criminality.
That is not what this study established.
Participants completed a brief self-report measure of subclinical traits.
A higher group average on that scale is not a diagnosis, and it cannot tell us that any particular bisexual woman is manipulative, callous, unsafe, or incapable of commitment.
Nor should openness to casual sex be quietly treated as evidence of defective character.
Sociosexuality measures a person’s orientation toward uncommitted sex. It does not measure honesty.
A person can prefer sexual novelty and negotiate relationships with exquisite integrity. Another can prefer monogamy in theory and lie like a rug in practice.
Desire and deception are not synonyms.
Are bisexual women more likely to cheat?
This study cannot answer that question.
It did not track infidelity. It did not follow marriages. It did not measure whether participants kept their agreements. It measured attitudes, tendencies, and self-reported traits at one moment in a young, geographically narrow sample.
In couples therapy, the clinically relevant question is rarely, “What category does this person belong to?” It is, “What did this couple agree to, and can both partners live honestly inside that agreement?”
A bisexual woman in a monogamous marriage is no more automatically deprived by monogamy than a heterosexual person is deprived by not sleeping with every attractive stranger. Attraction is not an instruction. Opportunity is not destiny. Fidelity is a practice.
The same distinction matters in neurodiverse open marriages, where complexity can become an explanation for broken agreements but never a substitute for repairing them.
The more interesting possibility
Why might mostly heterosexual and bisexual women report greater sexual excitation or openness to casual sex?
There are several plausible explanations, and this study cannot choose among them.
Women with less restricted sexual temperaments may be more willing to recognize and report attraction to more than one gender.
Bisexual identity may also require a certain willingness to depart from conventional sexual scripts. Social stigma, community norms, selection effects, and the limits of the measurement tools may all matter.
In other words, the personality traits may not produce the orientation. The orientation may not produce the traits. Both may reflect other influences—or the apparent relationship may look different in an older, more representative, or less culturally narrow sample.
The participants were mostly young undergraduates. At 21, many people have not yet finished choosing a sofa, never mind revealing the final architecture of their intimate lives.
Bisexuality is not a risk factor masquerading as an identity
Bisexual people already contend with a dreary collection of suspicions: that they are confused, promiscuous, unreliable, secretly gay, temporarily experimenting, or incapable of monogamy. Research framed carelessly can give these old prejudices a lab coat.
That matters because bisexual people face documented mental-health disparities within a culture that often mistrusts them from both directions.
I have written elsewhere about how depression and anxiety burden sexual minorities.
A study should help us understand a population, not provide more elegant vocabulary for stereotyping it.
The ethical reading is neither denial nor alarm.
We can acknowledge group differences without converting them into moral rankings.
We can discuss sociosexuality without treating sexual restraint as virtue and sexual openness as pathology. And we can notice statistical patterns while remembering that no average has ever shown up for couples therapy.
People do.
What couples should actually talk about
If partners differ in sexual excitation, inhibition, or sociosexuality, the disagreement can matter—whatever their orientations.
Useful questions include:
What does monogamy mean to each of us in practice?
Which behaviors count as betrayal?
Can we discuss attraction without using honesty as a weapon?
Is either partner agreeing to a relationship structure mainly from fear of abandonment?
What happens when novelty, opportunity, or dissatisfaction enters the marriage?
Do our agreements reflect our actual capacities, or merely the people we hope to appear to be?
Those questions are less thrilling than “Are bisexual women more like men?” They are also more likely to save a relationship.
The finding beneath the provocation
This research does not reveal what bisexual women are. It suggests that sexual orientation categories may be associated with nonlinear patterns in sexual temperament and some personality measures. Mostly heterosexual and bisexual women did not simply fall halfway between heterosexual and lesbian women. That alone is worth studying.
The paper’s most interesting contribution may therefore be its refusal—through its own messy results—to make sexuality behave like a single continuum.
People can share an orientation and differ profoundly in desire, inhibition, fidelity, temperament, and character. They can also differ in orientation and build a remarkably sturdy life together.
The category tells you where attraction may travel. It does not tell you whether the traveler keeps her word.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this study show that bisexual women are more psychopathic?
No. It found higher average scores among some non-heterosexual female groups on a self-report measure of subclinical psychopathy traits. That is not a clinical diagnosis and cannot be applied to an individual.
Does bisexuality make someone less suited to monogamy?
No. Orientation describes patterns of attraction, not a person’s capacity to make and honor a monogamous agreement. Sociosexuality, values, opportunity, relationship satisfaction, and personal integrity are separate variables.
Does greater sociosexuality mean greater infidelity?
Not automatically. A less restricted sociosexual orientation may matter in relationship compatibility, but infidelity requires breaking an agreement. This study did not measure cheating.
Why did the researchers use the phrase “male-shifted”?
They meant that the average scores of some groups of women moved toward the male average on certain measures. The phrase describes a statistical comparison; it is not a claim that bisexual women are male-like in general.
What is the practical lesson for couples?
Discuss sexual values and relationship agreements directly. Do not infer them from a partner’s gender or orientation. Compatibility is discovered through honest conversation, not demographic guesswork.
Related Reading
Why Work with Daniel?
Sexual orientation does not create a relationship problem. Silence, incompatible agreements, betrayal, shame, and lazy assumptions often do.
I work with couples navigating infidelity, mixed levels of desire, neurodiversity, monogamy, consensual non-monogamy, and the difficult conversations that begin when the old story about the relationship no longer fits.
The goal is not to force your life into a theory. It is to help both partners tell the truth, understand the system they have built, and decide what integrity requires next.
Schedule a free introductory call.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Semenyna, S. W., Vasey, P. L., & Honey, P. L. (2025). Sex and sexual orientation differences in Dark Triad traits, sexual excitation/inhibition, and sociosexuality. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 54, 2907–2919. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02895-5As a science-based couples therapist, I find it fascinating to explore how different personality traits and behaviors manifest across various sexual orientations.
