ABSTRACT
The two great issues in feminist criminology are: (1) whether traditional male-centered theories of crime apply to women, and (2) what explains the universal fact that women are far less likely than men to involve themselves in criminal activity (Price ampentity Sokoloff, 1995). The first issue need not concern us, but the second one—the gender ratio problem—is our focus in this chapter. The fact of huge gender differences in criminal behavior is not in dispute by feminists or anyone else: “[W]omen have had lower rates of crime in all nations, in all communities within nations, for all age groups, for all periods in recorded history, and for practically all crimes” (Leonard, 1995:55). The arrests for the FBI’s index crimes (rape omitted) in 2008 broken down by gender in Figure 10.1 illustrate the difference in the modern American context. The issue of why males commit more criminal acts than females has been called the “single most important fact that criminology theories must be able to explain” (Bernard, Snipes ampentity Gerould, 2010: 299). This may or may not be so, but Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990:149) have concluded that such an explanation is “beyond the scope of any available set of empirical data.”
