It's not that women were better snipers than men... The point rather is, during the WWII sniping was one of the few combat specialities where women could - and did - successfully compete with men.

Snipers, pilots, AA gun crews and sometimes SpecOps - those were the main fighting specialities women could excel in. It was hard for women to compete with men in most other fields because of their lesser physical strength. Consider, for example, the job of the cannon loader who plays all day long with few-tens-of-kilos shells...

As snipers, women were excellent. It can be truly said that they were as good as men. However, it still can’t be said that they were better than men. Let’s look at the statistics.

The most famous female sniper of WWII, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, had a score of 309 confirmed kills. This score is plain fantastic, surpassing even the famous Vasiliy Zaytsev’s 242 (including 11 enemy snipers).

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However, the top 10 list of WWII deadliest snipers (confirmed kills only) is all-male…

10. Stepan Petrenko (USSR): 422 kills

9. Vasily Golosov (USSR): 422 kills, including 70 enemy snipers!

8. Fyodor Dyachenko (USSR): 425 kills.

7. Fyodor Okhlopkov (USSR): 429 kills.

6. Mikhail Budenkov (USSR): 437 kills

5. Vladimir Pchelintsev (USSR): 456 kills

4. Ivan Kulbertinov (USSR): 489 kills

3. Nikolay Ilyin (USSR): 494 kills

2. Ivan Sidorenko (USSR): around 500 kills

1. Simo “The White Death” Häyhä (Finland): 542 Kills (705 unconfirmed). The deadliest sniper ever!

Now, let’s not forget another fact. Only in the Soviet Union, during World War II 428,335 individuals are believed to have received Red Army sniper training! Female snipers were, after all, a relatively small part of those. And yet the best female sniper clearly belongs to the same league with the best of the male ones.

If about half of those sniper trainees were women, maybe there would be (statistically) female snipers in the top 10 list, and we could have decided if women surpassed men as snipers or not. For now we can only say that based on historical experience, a woman can clearly be as good a sniper as a man. However, women still have to prove they are BETTER snipers.

Update:
Here are some additional facts.

In 1943 the Central Sniper School for women was opened near Moscow. 1885 female snipers were trained there and took part in the WWII. During the war, they scored about 12,000 kills. 185 of those snipers were killed in action.

Note: the School was not the only source of female snipers; many, including Lyudmila Pavlichenko, had a pre-war background, like competition shooting etc.

Anyway, the training in the School took half a year. Only the girls at the ages 18-25 with perfect vision and health were accepted.

The opinion during the WWII was that the average female sniper was better than the average male one, due to being more content, more patient and pulling the trigger more smoothly. On the other hand, that was not surprising, given the strict criteria to BECOME a female sniper.

By the way, Pavlichenko stopped being an active sniper about the end of 1942, because of the grave psychological trauma (her mortally wounded husband died on her hands). If that didn't happen, she had a big chance to be in the Top Ten...