What is meant by unchastity is the taint in a woman? Dhammapada 242 and AN 8.15 say:

Malitthiyā duccaritaṃ / malaṃ itthiyā duccaritaṃ

This is translated as:

Unchastity is the taint in a woman. (Buddharakkhita)
In a woman, misconduct is an impurity. (Thanissaro)
Misconduct is a woman’s stain. (Sujato)
A woman’s stain is misconduct. (Bodhi)

The above stain specific to women is found among other stains, as follows:

Bhikkhus, there are these eight stains. What eight?
(1) Non-recitation is the stain of the hymns.
(2) The stain of houses is lack of upkeep.
(3) The stain of beauty is laziness.
(4) Heedlessness is the stain of a guard.
(5) A woman’s stain is misconduct.
(6) Miserliness is a donor’s stain.
(7) Bad unwholesome qualities are stains in this world and the next.
(8) A stain graver than this is ignorance, the very worst of stains.
These, bhikkhus, are the eight stains.

Despite this focus on women above, the definition of sexual misconduct in the suttas is addressed to men, as follows:

He engages in sensual misconduct. He gets sexually involved with those who are protected by their mothers, their fathers, their
brothers, their sisters, their relatives, or their Dhamma; those with
husbands, those who entail punishments, or even those crowned with
flowers by another man.
AN 10.176

My question is why do Dhammapada 242 and AN 8.15 focus on sexual misconduct as the stain of a woman (when they are so many other stains, such as listed in MN 7)?
IMO &quot;woman's stain&quot; is a mistranslation (or at best gives the wrong impression).
The whole chapter (of the Dhammapada) is about ways in which the audience (e.g. you or me) may be stained (or are stained, were stained).
(It would be applicable to &quot;a woman&quot; only if she were the reader, the subject, the audience of the talk -- but in the AN 8,15 context, at least, the audience was all men, all bhikkhus).
I think that (i.e. that it's the audience's stain, or that the audience would be stained if they were blame-worthy) is evident from the context -- for example from the start of that chapter of the Dhammapada:


One by one, little by little, moment by moment, a wise man should remove his own impurities, as a smith removes his dross from silver.


... through to the end ...


Easily seen is the fault of others, but one's own fault is difficult to see. Like chaff one winnows another's faults, but hides one's own, even as a crafty fowler hides behind sham branches.

He who seeks another's faults, who is ever censorious — his cankers grow. He is far from destruction of the cankers.



It's meant as advice to you ... and is not a statement that's meant to censure &quot;a woman&quot; (itthiyā).
Similarly you may be stained by ...

Your being lazy in the presence of beauty
Your having a house and being negligent (or, possibly, being negligent because you have a house)
Your misconduct with a woman

The Pali (Malitthiyā duccaritaṃ or malaṃ itthiyā duccaritaṃ) doesn't have all the prepositions which translators add to the English (at most the Pali nouns are declined, have a case ... I think itthiyā is declined like jāti, for what that's worth, so the syntax doesn't distinguish whether it's genitive, locative, dative, ablative, or instrumental; there's no verb).
I think the word-order in the Dhammapada is unreliable (it's highly condensed, to make it verse); but that the word-order in AN 8.15 i.e.

malaṃ, bhikkhave, itthiyā duccaritaṃ

... implies that the word itthiyā is there to qualify the type of misconduct, and not there to be the agent, owner, or object of the stain.

I cross-posted this to SuttaCentral -- Questioning the translation of AN 8.15, “Misconduct is a woman’s stain”.
I also wrote there that I think that the translations (or at least the interpretations) of most of the other stains are questionable too.