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| - A claim alleging that morgues prefer to hire women over men has circulated online since March 2023 when a user on X quoted a now-deleted post that said, "Wait until the men find out that there are waxers ONLY wax women and don't see male clients," adding, "There's also some morgues that strictly only hire women and I think y'all can put two and two together as to why."
The claim went viral and soon evolved into a meme that was shared widely on TikTok, Threads and Reddit. Some users posted vague references to the "reason" morgues supposedly hire more women than men, leaving users to deduce it for themselves, implying the cause was necrophilia, or sexual attraction to corpses, which sometimes results in sexual abuse of the deceased.
(Careless-Bridge8829 on Reddit)
One distinction to note about this claim is that it often conflates "morgue" and "mortuary," which are two distinct entities. A morgue is typically a clinical setting within a hospital where corpses await autopsy or identification. A mortuary is typically a funeral home that offers a variety of services like embalming and cremation for the deceased.
One user commenting on the claim posted on X, "Statistically, many morgues and funeral homes prefer to hire women, for this reason. Necrophilia happens a lot more than people realize, and those men usually get caught because they give their wife or girlfriend a bacterial infection that can only come from the dead." Allegations similar to the one in this comment have been previously investigated by Snopes and found to be false.
On TikTok, somebody said, "I'm not afraid to death, [sic] i'm afraid of this," while another reported, "There was a woman that got pregnant from sleeping with a dead guy. It made the news. Crazy stuff." This claim was also investigated by Snopes and found to be labeled as satire.
One user on Reddit said, "Don't worry it's also completely untrue, just a myth that gets passed around."
Indeed, despite the popularity of the claim over time, there is no proof that morgues—or mortuaries—prefer to hire women over men for any reason, let alone specifically for concerns about necrophilia.
While it is true that 92% of genuine necrophiles are men, according to a 1989 scientific study, and the number of women entering the mortuary sciences has steadily increased in the last 30 years, there is no evidence of a correlation between the two.
Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the National Funeral Directors Association, told Snopes:
Funeral homes do not take gender into consideration when hiring staff. Funeral homes are looking for caring, compassionate people who have the skills needed to serve families that are grieving the death of a loved one; gender plays absolutely no role in this.
I would also note that taking gender into consideration during the hiring process is illegal under federal law.
I cannot provide data on the entire funeral service profession because gender isn't always captured on licensure for funeral directors/embalmers (managed by state agencies); therefore, there's no objective data source.
What I can share is that among members of the National Funeral Directors Association, the number of female members has more than doubled over the last 10 years (7% in 2004 to 18.2% in 2023).
Among mortuary science students, the change is even more dramatic. According to our Mortuary Science Student Satisfaction Survey, in 1995, just 35% of students were female and, 12 years later, 60% of students were female. According to our survey, in 2022 78.8% of students were female (we're due to next conduct this survey next year).
Necrophilia does occur in morgues, such as the 2014 case in which a morgue attendant admitted to raping 100 corpses. But a 2018 report from Next Avenue, a nonprofit outlet that covers news pertaining to aging, suggested the rise of women in the mortuary sciences "reflects a larger societal acceptance of women in roles previously dominated by men."
Angela Woosley, an instructor in the University of Minnesota's mortuary sciences program, told the publication:
Funeral directors used to perform a finite function and most funerals were pretty much done one way. Now we are facilitators. We take a client-centered approach to discover a family's needs and to understand the story of the person who died. We bring the community together for a one-time event… There was a longstanding cultural taboo that women were too delicate or squeamish for this work. When I still hear that, I say, remember that women have always been nurses. The ill and the dead share a lot in common; bodies do things that require a strong stomach… Preparing for a service is like being a project manager or an event planner. It's a job that requires communication skills and the ability to multi-task, two areas where we know women excel.
Snopes has fact-checked other claims regarding sexual abuse of the deceased in the past, including claims that a Nevada morgue employee was arrested for pimping out corpses for sex, that the FBI seized over 3,000 penises during a raid of a morgue employee's home and that a man took a selfie with the corpse of his dead girlfriend.
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