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The relationship between gender and crime presents the most consistent and pronounced pattern in the whole of criminology. In every society for which reliable data exists, and across every category of recorded offending, men are convicted of substantially more crime than women, and the disparity is greatest for serious and violent offences. Official statistics for England and Wales show that the large majority of those convicted of indictable offences, and an even larger majority of the prison population, are male; women's recorded offending is concentrated in less serious property offences such as theft. This consistent pattern — the gender gap in offending — is so robust that gender is arguably the single strongest predictor of criminality, stronger than class, age or ethnicity. It demands sociological explanation. Yet the topic poses two distinct questions that students must keep separate: first, why do women appear to offend so much less than men; and second, why do men offend so much more. For much of its history the sociology of crime treated male offending as the unexamined norm and asked only the first question; the development of feminist criminology and of the sociology of masculinities has insisted that the second question is equally important. This lesson examines explanations of female conformity (Parsons, Heidensohn, Carlen), the liberation thesis (Adler), the chivalry thesis and its critics (Pollak, Farrington and Morris, Heidensohn), the masculinities approach (Messerschmidt, Connell), and the feminist transformation of victimology (Walklate).
Key Definition: The gender gap in crime refers to the well-documented finding that males are significantly more likely than females to be convicted of criminal offences, especially violent and serious crimes. The size of the gap varies by offence type — it is widest for violence and sexual offences and narrowest for low-level property crime — and is somewhat smaller in self-report data than in conviction statistics.
This lesson addresses the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) Paper 3: Crime and Deviance specification requirement that students understand "the social distribution of crime and deviance by … gender, including recent patterns and trends in crime", together with the broader requirement to apply sociological theories and methods to crime. It connects the patterning of offending by gender to the operation of the criminal justice system (the chivalry/double-deviance debate) and to questions about the validity of official statistics. The masculinities material and the feminist analysis of women as victims also speak to the specification's concern with victimisation and with the role of social control. Gender provides an ideal vehicle for the synoptic AO2 that 30-mark questions reward, because it links the substantive topic to theory, method and stratification.
Before explaining the pattern it is important to describe it accurately and qualitatively. The principal features of the gender gap, as evidenced by official statistics, self-report studies and victim surveys, are as follows.
| Feature of the pattern | Qualitative description |
|---|---|
| Overall conviction rate | A large majority of those convicted of indictable offences are male; the prison population is overwhelmingly male. |
| Offence type | The gap is widest for violent and sexual offences and for serious acquisitive crime, and narrowest for low-level theft and handling. Women's recorded offending is heavily concentrated in property offences such as shoplifting. |
| Self-report evidence | Self-report studies (e.g. Graham and Bowling, 1995) confirm that males offend more, but indicate that the gap is somewhat smaller than conviction data suggest, implying that part — but only part — of the official gap reflects criminal-justice processing rather than behaviour. |
| Victimisation | Men are more likely to be victims of violence by strangers in public; women are disproportionately the victims of domestic and sexual violence, much of which goes unreported and so is hidden in official data. |
| Trends | Female recorded offending has risen modestly over recent decades, but the gender gap remains very large; there is no evidence of convergence on a scale that would close it. |
The pattern therefore poses the twin explanatory tasks set out above. We turn first to explanations of female conformity.
Parsons (1955) argued, from a functionalist standpoint, that gender differences in crime reflect differences in sex-role socialisation within the conventional nuclear family. Because women perform the expressive role (nurturing, emotional caregiving) and men the instrumental role (breadwinning, achievement in the public sphere), boys and girls are socialised differently: boys toward assertiveness, competitiveness and risk-taking, girls toward compliance, caring and emotional control. Parsons further suggested that, because the father is frequently absent in the public world of work, boys lack a clear male role model and may engage in compensatory compulsory masculinity — an exaggerated, often aggressive assertion of toughness — to demonstrate that they are not feminine, with delinquency as one expression. The argument is an early statement of the idea, developed far more carefully by later masculinities theorists, that male crime is bound up with the accomplishment of gender identity. Its weaknesses, however, are considerable: it is biologically essentialist and ahistorical, assumes a single nuclear-family form, and offers no real explanation of why the traits it describes should issue in criminal rather than merely conventionally "masculine" behaviour.
Frances Heidensohn (1985), in Women and Crime, produced the first sustained feminist analysis of the gender gap and remains the pivotal figure on this topic. Drawing on control theory, she argued that women conform not because they are naturally more law-abiding but because patriarchal society subjects them to far more pervasive control, which simultaneously reduces their opportunities to offend and raises the costs of deviance. Control operates at three levels.
| Level of control | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Control in the home | Women's domestic role — childcare, housework, emotional labour — confines them to the private sphere, restricts their time and movement, and leaves limited opportunity for offending. Daughters, too, are more closely supervised than sons (a "bedroom culture" of domesticated leisure). The threat of domestic violence enforces compliance for some women. |
| Control in public | Women's use of public space is constrained by the fear of male violence and of acquiring a "reputation". The risk of sexual harassment and assault, and the moral censure attached to women who are out alone or at night, function as informal controls that keep many women in "safe" private spaces. |
| Control at work | Workplace control by (often male) supervisors, occupational segregation and the "glass ceiling" limit women's autonomy and restrict their access to the senior occupational positions in which the most lucrative white-collar and corporate crime is committed. |
Heidensohn's decisive contribution is to reframe the question: the puzzle is not female conformity but the system of control that produces it. Crucially, she argues that when these controls break down — for women who are not embedded in domestic relationships or who occupy marginal positions — the protective and restraining effect is removed, a point developed empirically by Carlen.
Pat Carlen (1988), in Women, Crime and Poverty, conducted unstructured interviews with a small purposive sample of working-class women convicted of a range of offences. Combining control theory with a class analysis, she argued that working-class women are encouraged to conform by the promise of two implicit "deals", and offend when both are perceived to have failed.
| Deal | Explanation | Failure |
|---|---|---|
| The class deal | Material rewards (a decent standard of living, consumer goods) in return for respectable paid work. | For women facing poverty, unemployment, low pay and insecure housing, the promised rewards never materialise. |
| The gender deal | Emotional and material security in return for conforming to conventional domestic femininity within a relationship with a man. | For women who experienced abuse, neglect, time in care, or relationship breakdown, the promised security proved illusory or actively harmful. |
Carlen concluded that the women in her study had, in effect, decided they had "nothing to lose" by offending once both deals had collapsed. Her work is theoretically important because it directly contradicts the liberation thesis: her offenders were not liberated, affluent or empowered women but among the most marginalised, poor and powerless — exactly the opposite of Adler's image.
Key Definition: The gender deal is the implicit social arrangement in which women are offered emotional and material security in exchange for conforming to conventional domestic gender roles. Carlen argues that when this deal, together with the class deal, breaks down, the controls that normally secure female conformity are loosened.
If the first task is to explain female conformity, the second — long neglected — is to explain male offending without simply treating it as natural. The sociology of masculinities addresses this directly.
R. W. Connell (1995), in Masculinities, provided the conceptual foundation by arguing that masculinity is not a fixed biological essence but a socially constructed, plural and hierarchical accomplishment. At the apex sits hegemonic masculinity — the culturally idealised, dominant form (typically associated with paid work, heterosexuality, authority, physical toughness and the subordination of women) against which all men are measured. Subordinated and marginalised masculinities are defined in relation to it. The significance for criminology is that masculinity is something that must be continually achieved through action, including, for some men in some circumstances, criminal action.
James Messerschmidt (1993), building explicitly on Connell, argued that crime is a resource for "accomplishing" or "doing" masculinity — a way of demonstrating manhood when other, legitimate resources for doing so are unavailable. Different structural positions afford different resources, and so produce different gendered crimes.
| Position | Legitimate resources for masculinity | Crime as alternative resource |
|---|---|---|
| White, middle-class men | Career success, authority, economic provision affirm hegemonic masculinity in the public and private spheres. | In the workplace, masculinity may be expressed through white-collar and corporate crime — risk-taking, competitiveness and the pursuit of profit "by any means". |
| White, working-class men | Fewer legitimate resources; hegemonic masculinity harder to attain. | Masculinity asserted through toughness, the "ethic of the gang", manual physicality and violence. |
| Marginalised / minority men | Most excluded from legitimate routes to hegemonic masculinity (e.g. by unemployment and discrimination). | Masculinity expressed through street crime, robbery and violence, which become means of winning respect and dominance. |
Messerschmidt's strength is to show that crime is committed by men of all classes, but takes class-specific forms, each an attempt to construct a viable masculine identity. The logic — that crime substitutes for blocked legitimate avenues of doing masculinity — can be represented as follows.
graph TD
A["Hegemonic masculinity is the cultural ideal all men are measured against"] --> B["Legitimate resources for 'doing' masculinity (work, authority, provision)"]
B --> C{"Are legitimate resources available?"}
C -->|"Yes (e.g. affluent men)"| D["Masculinity affirmed legitimately; some express it via corporate crime"]
C -->|"No (e.g. marginalised men)"| E["Crime becomes an alternative resource for accomplishing masculinity"]
E --> F["Street crime, violence, robbery as displays of toughness and dominance"]
The gendered analysis of crime extends to victimisation. Sandra Walklate (2004) and other feminist victimologists challenged the positivist victimology of writers such as Marvin Wolfgang, which had developed the concept of victim precipitation — the idea that victims contribute to their own victimisation. In the context of rape and domestic violence, Walklate argued, victim-precipitation reasoning slides into victim-blaming and reproduces patriarchal assumptions. Feminist victimology instead foregrounds the scale of unreported and "hidden" violence against women, the secondary victimisation women experience within the criminal-justice process, and the way the fear of crime itself operates as a form of social control over women's lives. This connects the topic to the broader sociology of victimisation on the specification and shows that gender shapes the experience of crime as victim as well as offender.
The masculinities approach also has considerable contemporary relevance. Writers in this tradition have linked particular forms of offending — the territorial violence associated with some youth subcultures, the aggressive risk-taking valorised in certain occupational cultures, and even the corporate risk-taking that produced financial crises — to the pressures of accomplishing a viable masculine identity under changing economic conditions. Where deindustrialisation has eroded the traditional working-class breadwinner role, some sociologists argue, the legitimate resources for "doing" masculinity have contracted, and crime, violence and the assertion of "respect" may fill the gap — a synoptic link to the lessons on social class, subcultural theory and globalisation. The approach is not without its critics: besides the charge of tautology noted below, it has been argued that it risks recycling the very stereotype of the dangerous young man that it sets out to analyse, and that it pays insufficient attention to the many men who experience the same pressures yet do not offend. Nonetheless, its central achievement endures: it makes masculinity itself an object of explanation, rather than treating male crime as the natural and unexamined baseline against which female conformity is measured.
Freda Adler (1975), in Sisters in Crime, advanced the liberation thesis: as women achieve greater equality through the women's movement — in education, employment and public life — their pattern of offending will increasingly resemble men's, and the gender gap will narrow. Liberation, on this liberal-feminist account, gives women not only legitimate opportunities but also illegitimate ones, including access to the occupational positions from which white-collar crime is committed. Adler pointed to apparent rises in female arrests for traditionally "male" offences as supporting evidence.
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