DOES THE GENDER GAP IN DELINQUENCY VARY BY LEVEL OF PATRIARCHY? A CROSS‐NATIONAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

• Date: 01 November 2017
• Author: JANNE KIVIVUORI,LORINE A. HUGHES,ROBERT LYTLE,STEVEN F. MESSNER,JUKKA SAVOLAINEN,SAMANTHA APPLIN
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12161
• Published date: 01 November 2017

DOES THE GENDER GAP IN DELINQUENCY VARY

BY LEVEL OF PATRIARCHY? A CROSS-NATIONAL

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS∗

JUKKA SAVOLAINEN,1SAMANTHA APPLIN,2

STEVEN F. MESSNER,3LORINE A. HUGHES,4ROBERT LYTLE,5

and JANNE KIVIVUORI6

1Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

2Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Cortland

3Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY

4School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver

5Department of Criminal Justice, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

6Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy, University of Helsinki

We examined cross-national variation in the gender differential in offending, which

is often referred to as the gender gap in crime. Analyses were directed toward two

empirical questions: 1) Is the gender gap narrower in less patriarchal sociocultural set-

tings, and if so, 2) is this outcome a result of higher levels of offending on the part

of girls, lower levels of offending on the part of boys, or some combination thereof?

To address these questions, we compiled a multilevel, cross-national data set combin-

ing information on self-reported offending from the second International Self Report

Delinquency Survey (ISRD-2) with normative and structural indicators of societal lev-

els of patriarchy. The results from regression equations showed the gender gap in delin-

quency to be narrower at reduced national levels of patriarchy. The predicted proba-

bilities calculated from regression coefficients suggested that this narrowing is a result

of increased offending among girls and, to some extent, of decreased offending among

boys in less patriarchal nations. Sensitivity checks with alternative model specifications

confirmed these patterns but also identified a potential outlier. We discuss the implica-

tions of these descriptive findings for etiological research and theory.

The decline of patriarchy has transformed the social order of Western democratic na-

tions. For instance, the growth in labor force participation of women has contributed to

the erosion of the patriarchal family structure in the United States (Ruggles, 2015). As

a result of their increased economic independence, contemporary women are less likely

to marry, more likely to divorce, and more likely to delay family formation. The “rise of

women” (DiPrete and Buchmann, 2013) has been particularly striking in the educational

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2017.55.issue-4/issuetoc.

We wish to thank Dirk Enzmann and Ineke Haen Marshall, the principal investigators of the

ISRD-2, for granting us access to these data. We are grateful to the editor and the anonymous

reviewers for the helpful comments on prior versions of the article.

Direct correspondence to Jukka Savolainen, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan,

330 Packard St. (Perry Building), 1106L, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (e-mail: jsavolai@umich.edu).

C2017 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12161

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 55 Number 4 726–753 2017 726

CROSS-NATIONAL GENDER GAP IN DELINQUENCY 727

arena. To illustrate, in the United States, the gender gap in educational attainment has

not merely closed, but among cohorts born since 1960, women outperform men by an

increasing margin. These social trends have not escaped the attention of criminologists.

Forty years have passed since the controversial claim that women were becoming more

similar to men in their participation in criminal activities (Adler, 1975, 1977). Neverthe-

less, compared with other areas of social life, evidence of gender convergence in criminal

activity remains weak at best, despite an extensive body of scholarship (Heimer, 2000;

Heimer, Lauritsen, and Lynch, 2009; Lauritsen, Heimer, and Lynch, 2009; Schwartz et al.,

2009; Steffensmeier et al., 2005, 2006).

In what follows, we suggest possible reasons why research has not produced more con-

clusive evidence of gender convergence in offending behavior. These arguments point to

limitations with the trend study paradigm. To supplement previous approaches, we ex-

ploit data from a cross-national survey of self-reported delinquency among adolescents.

These individual-level data are linked to national indicators of patriarchal norms and gen-

der inequality to create a multilevel file of individuals nested within countries. In a manner

of speaking, our approach is to “read history sideways” (Thornton, 2005) to observe more

variation in patriarchy than is typically possible with available time-series data. The re-

sults yield qualified support for the hypothesis that the gender gap in delinquent offending

is narrower among nations that are less patriarchal.

THE RESEARCH CONTEXT

Although an interest in gender patterns and differences in offending can be found in

the works of several criminologists in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Scheider, 2000),

Freda Adler’s 1975 book, Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal, is gen-

erally regarded as a starting point for the development of gender-centered theorizing.

Premised on the notion that women embedded in the public domain have less traditional

gender ideologies, Adler put forth the claim that emancipated women would also be more

inclined to commit crime, giving rise to the liberation–emancipation perspective. Rita

Simon’s work (1975) was also prominent in fostering dialogue on gender and crime in

the 1970s. In the monograph Women and Crime, Simon argued that women traditionally

had fewer criminal opportunities than men as a result of their more limited participation

in activities outside the domestic sphere. She further reasoned that with the emergence

of the women’s movement and the appreciable growth of the numbers of women in the

labor force, women would increasingly be exposed to opportunities for certain types of

crime, and like men, some would take advantage of them.

The claims of the liberation–emancipation perspective prompted a vigorous response

in the criminological community. Some critics characterized the theoretical underpinnings

as na¨

ıve and misleading (Chesney-Lind, 1986). Numerous scholars disputed the assump-

tion that as women made strides in society toward more equal treatment, they would be-

gin to mirror men in various realms of life (Box and Hale, 1984; Daly and Chesney-Lind,

1988; Giordano and Cernkovich, 1979; Heimer, 2000). Indeed, to some extent, crimino-

logical literature on the changing gender order became mired by its association with the

rejected mechanism of the “masculinization of women” as put forth by the liberation

perspective.

In a recent elaboration, Hunnicutt and Broidy (2004) suggested that the abandonment

of the liberation perspective may have been premature: “It is not unreasonable,” they