The Unexpected Consequences of Gender Equality

Women are becoming more similar to men in many dimensions. Crime is one of them. The number of women who commit crimes is still small compared to men, but it is on the rise. For this reason, it is important to make empirical predictions of the future trends and the factors that drive gender convergence in crime. Our study investigates the impact of gender norms on female criminality using a cross-country panel dataset, a multiple imputation strategy to handle missing data, and a Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) methodology. By using female labor force participation (FLFP) as a proxy for gender norms, we find a positive relationship between FLFP and female criminality, which remains robust even after controlling for confounding factors and addressing the degree of selection on unobservables versus observables, as proposed by Oster (2019). To isolate causality we use the percentage of women in the labor force in the U.S. who emigrated from each country as an instrumental variable for female labor force participation in their home country. Our results suggest that we should expect the current positive trend for female criminality to continue as societies become more gender equal with significant implications for preventive policies and the criminal justice system which have been primarily designed for males.