Gender inequality and criminalization: A cross-national analysis of the legal social control of women

This dissertation presents a new thesis regarding gender inequality and the legal control of women. Gender inequality is the departure from parity in the representation of women and men in key dimensions of social life. Different from "women's status," gender inequality reveals disparities in the distribution of material resources to women and men. The study of social control essentially investigates the maintenance of the existing social order for, according to some theorists, the benefit of the materially powerful in a society; control increases when the powerful are threatened. Criminalization, the state's ultimate means of social control, is the selective process of applying the criminal law to social behavior. This new thesis challenges the "liberation hypothesis" of women's criminality and previous quantitative cross-national research in that tradition. I hypothesize that the rate of women's criminalization as a group is inversely related to the distribution of material resources by gender. The study utilizes factor analysis and regression procedures, a cross-national sample of 45 nations, and a cross-sectional research design (circa 1980 data). Eleven social indicators of gender inequality and one measure of national economic development comprise the initial independent variables; the dependent variable is the arrest rate of women aged 15-44 for all crimes. Results reveal that three factors underlie the gender inequality indicators: aspects of urbanization, personal-societal connection, feminized industrialization. The final model tests the significance of these factors and the measure of national wealth as predictors of the dependent variable. The statistically significant model explains 15% of the variance. Gender inequality in the personal-societal connection factor, the only statistically significant independent variable, has an inverse effect on the dependent variable. Nations with lower rates of women's arrests are those nations with greater fertility rates, maternal mortality rates, and female/male age differences at marriage, and lower ratios of women to men in the formal labor force and holding seats in the national legislature. The results indicate that greater inequality between women and men in the personal-societal connection factor seems to decrease the legal social control of women, while less inequality in that domain appears to increase women's criminalization.