Doing Gender, Avoiding Crime: The Gendered Meaning of Criminal Behavior and the Gender Gap in Offending in the United States

Abstract

Men are overrepresented in criminal offending, arrest, and incarceration rates, resulting in a gender gap in crime data. I use the mathematical structure and propositions of affect control theory to understand how the symbolic meanings society holds for gender and crime relate to this observed difference in women’s and men’s offending. While criminal behaviors are deviant for both men and women, I hypothesize that they produce even more deflection when enacted by a woman actor than by a man actor in computer simulations. This first hypothesis is supported in a dataset containing 109 criminal behaviors drawn from three affect control theory dictionaries collected in English in the United States in 1998, 2002 to 2004, and 2012 to 2014. Second, I hypothesize that when a crime produces a greater gender gap in deflection in simulations, there will be a greater observed gender gap in alleged offending. I test this hypothesis using four sources of crime data: victim self-reports, police reports, arrest data, and juvenile court statistics. I find hypothesis support using all data sources except victim self-reports. Affect control theory provides an explicit social psychological understanding of how gendered meanings of behavior translate into criminal behavior as recorded in offending data (e.g., Uniform Crime Report).