The popular image of the witch is of a woman, and the bulk of accused witches in medieval and early modern witchcraft trials were indeed women. But what about werewolves during the same period? Were accused werewolves primarily men?
Yes, there was. Most of those accused of lycanthropy and witchcraft —Pierre Bourgot, Henry Gardinn, Gilles Garnier, Hans the Werewolf, Johan Martensen, Jacques Roulet, Matthys Stoop, Peter Stubbe, Thiess of Kaltenbrun, Michel Verdung, Joos Verpraet, and Jan Vindevogel, for example— were men.
The relatively few women accused of lycanthropy—like Hendrikje Dirk and the mother and daughter, Antoinette and Pernette Gandillon— were accused alongside male relatives, never alone. Another possible example was Peter Stubbe's daughter (whose name doesn't seem to have been saved in the historical record), but it's not clear whether she was also accused of lycanthropy or just witchcraft and having an incestuous relationship with her father.
Why men were overwhelmingly accused of being werewolves has no clear answer. Another clear pattern, though, is that they were all from France, the Low Countries, Germany, the Baltic countries, or Switzerland: there were no werewolf trials anywhere else. Once again, however, that pattern has no obvious answer for its occurrence. although it is worth mentioning that Germany and France had the most intense witch hunts during the Early Modern period, far outstripping the British Isles, Spain, Italy, or Portugal.
Another uncertain question about this topic is whether not the accused werewolves were entirely innocent and simply tortured into confessing or if at least some of them suffered from the rare mental illness, clinical lycanthropy. The sentence of Jacques Roulet, for example, was revoked after he was judged insane.
It's also possible that at least some accused werewolves might have been genuine serial killers. For instance, Gilles Garnier does seem to have been a 16th century version of Jeffrey Dahmer, mostly because of the amount of witnesses.
In general, European folk belief maintained that being able to transform into a wolf was strictly part of the male domain. Women were associated with the phenomenon, but only through witchcraft - and they themselves were generally not perceived as being able to transform into wolves. In fact, European folk belief generally maintained that werewolves were cursed into involuntarily transforming because their mothers had used witchcraft to avoid the pain of childbirth: the resulting child periodically became a werewolf (as an adult) if it were a boy, and if a girl, she was cursed by becoming a mare - tormenting young men with nightmares. So, according to folk belief, women were practically excluded from the idea of transforming into wolves, because the curse that caused the condition manifested differently for men and women.
The following is an excerpt dealing with this from my Introduction to Folklore addressing this:
The nightmare and the werewolf are two creatures that deal with the human spirit in a way different from other beliefs related to the soul. People believed that these were the products of bizarre transformations endured by innocent people who are unaware of the circumstance. While the nightmare was a traveling spirit of a woman, the curse of the werewolf affected men. In both cases, European peasants regarded them as victims of witchcraft. The cause of their suffering was that their mothers had used magical means to avoid the pains of childbirth, leaving their children to suffer these unnatural afflictions.
In the case of the nightmare, while a woman “went mare,” as it was called, she traveled the land to plague others. She frequently appeared as a mouse that would sit upon the chests of men, giving them horrible dreams.
There are many legends dealing with this motif. One tells of a young man who repeatedly suffers from a nightmare. His mother searched the house and found an opening large enough for a mouse. That night, when her son was in the throes of a nightmare, she plugged the hole and put a pot over the boy’s chest. The next morning, she removed the pot. A mouse jumped off the boy and transformed into a beautiful young woman. That very day, a woman in a nearby village died before waking.
Some variants of this elaborate story – Migratory Legend 4010, “Married to the Nightmare” – go on to tell how the young man married this strange visitor. They lived a happy life until one day the woman and her mother-in-law quarreled and the old woman told her daughter-in-law how she arrived in the household. She then removed the plug from the wall, and the young woman changed into a mouse and disappeared forever.
This echoes a motif usually found in folktales – which are sometimes told as legends – involving the magical bride captured because her garment of swan wings or seal skin is taken and hidden by the hero. One day, the woman finds her hidden magical wings or skin, and she is compelled to return to her former shape and life. This was an ancient story that combined with the idea of the nightmare.
The werewolf was the male counterpart of the nightmare. While this cursed man sleeps, his spirit travels the land in the shape of a wolf. Unlike the nightmare, who merely gave bad dreams, the werewolf kills livestock and people, having a special affinity for pregnant women. Like the nightmare, the man sleeps unaware that his soul prowls the land in animal form. His identity is discovered when he is wounded in wolf form or someone calls out his name. Werewolf stories can conclude with the disenchantment of the man, but some also end with his death.
The idea of the werewolf draws on a much older belief in shape shifting. There is clear evidence of a widespread European tradition that people, and especially men, intentionally took animal forms through magical means or special talent. This belief appears in the Satyricon, the first-century Roman work of Petronius, described above. In this story, a soldier who is a versipellis, a skin-changer or werewolf, is walking among some tombstones one night when he removes his clothes and urinates around them. The clothes turn to stone, and the soldier becomes a wolf. That night a wolf kills some sheep, but a slave tending the animals pierces the wolf in the neck. The next day, the soldier, in human form, is found to have a wound in his neck.
Christiansen classifies stories of this kind as Migratory Legend 4005, “the Werewolf Husband,” in which a man’s wife discovers that her husband is a werewolf as indicated by wounds that he has received. The act of recognition releases the man from the spell. Ella Odstedt in her Varulven i Svensk Folktradition (1943) describes three principal ways in which a man becomes a wolf: the man’s mother had magically avoided pain in childbirth, and this brought a curse on her child; a curse is magically placed on a man by another person; or the werewolf actively and magically brings about his own transformation. Odstedt suggests that the last of these causes is the oldest. Dag Strömbäck supports this suggestion. He further points out in his Folklore och Filologi (1970) that Old Norse sources confirm the idea that men magically caused their own change.