Ask Lemmy

Cuz women don’t have the balls to commit crime.

This is a joke.

In most cases, I believe it's a mix of hormones and traditionalism. Men have generally been more likely to seek grandeur by participating in violent activities, or, violent activities are demanded by their particular social group. Sometimes a mix of both.

I think it also it boils down to how gender roles are taught by different cultures. If men are taught to be the risk takers, it only makes sense that boundaries and laws will get pushed more by men. After all, intentionally breaking a law may simply be viewed as a calculated risk and not as something that should never be done.

Honestly speaking, it seems too easy of an answer to just blame male physiology. The social aspects of this can't be ignore either.

I think it's social conditioning and lack of mental health resources. Girls are strongly socially conditioned to "play nice" and get along at all costs, which tends to lead to more rules following. Boys are often socialized to suppress their emotions while at the same time are allowed to act out and encouraged to be tough and macho. The bad boy act is romanticized and violence is at best tolerated and at worst idolized.

So you have men who never learned how to deal with their feelings who also are used to having a physical, often violent outlet because that's the only acceptable thing they know.

From least to most relevant:

• There are more crimes that can only be done by men than by women.
• There are crimes that are taken more seriously by law enforcement when done by men.
• Crime bosses are still bosses and unlikely to hire and promote women.
• Housework may be real but unpaid work, but does not lend itself to workplace crime.
• Males are more likely to be convicted, skewing statistics.
• We are teaching kids that being angry or horny are typically male emotions.
• Seeking help from family or institutions is discouraged for men, while being self reliant is idolized.
• We stopped prosecuting the crime of witchcraft /s

I think a mix of factors, the ones I think about are:

There is often no fallback. After a certain point there is no one to take care of you so if you fail your options quickly run thin. This leads to feeling increased pressure to do high risk activities.

I also think men value their lives less. There is a certain line of thought that is in every mans head where they are pissed off and they look at their life and they look at what they're pissed off at and they think "What if I just threw it all away to destroy that thing" at least I could say my life was useful. For most men this check fails because their lives are decent but for people on the bink I can see them thinking its worth to trade their life to take someone elses. If I were in the US i'd probably trade my life for Trump's if I thought i could do it.

Biology, higher propensity for taking extreme risks, tolerance for violence, physically stronger on average, mentally mature slower, wider distribution across the iq bellcurve. We grow up fighting each other for fun, we see and learn about millions of us dying in wars, we see how failures are treated in society, we see a lot of media showing 'failures' lashing out at society.

To somewhat play Devil's Advocate, I would highlight that the stats don't show who commits more crime, but who gets caught more. If no-one arrests you, (or if a court finds you not guilty), you won't be in the stats.

In my country, for instance, police can stop and search you if they have "reasonable suspicion" that you're carrying something illegal (stolen good, drugs, weapons etc.). If police are operating under the assumption that men commit more crime than women, they're far more likely to be suspicious of a man committing the same crime as a woman.

I haven't read anything that's about gender bias specifically at this level of policing, but I do know there's a lot of research (especially in the US) on how racial bias causes black neighbourhoods to be more heavily policed than neighbourhoods with comparable crime levels, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle where heavier policing leads to increased belief that black people commit more crime, which leads to heavier policing^[1][2]

I do know that after an arrest has been made, women tend to fare better than men; they are less likely to be sentenced, and when they are, they tend to receive less severe sentences than men, even for equivalent crimes^[3][4] . This is speculative, but I imagine this has a cascading effect — if there is a crime where the punishment could range from community service to a prison sentence, then the person who gets community service is statistically less likely to reoffend than the person who goes to prison^[5]

All that in mind, I'm pretty confident that the gender ratio in crime statistics gives a skewed impression of who actually commits more crime, and that women are effectively undercounted if we're talking about who commits more crime — though I can't guess on to what degree this is the case. However, it's entirely possible that women commit crimes at a similar rate to men, or even at a higher rate. We can't really know.

And to finish off this comment with a slightly more shitposty answer that still links into my broader point, it's possible that women commit as much crime as men, but the statistics are skewed towards men because women are more effective criminals.

I include this last possibility because I am uncomfortable with how you framed things in your question, with phrases like "crime being disproportionately committed by men is a universal constant". Statistics are never Truth, and are, at best, only ever an approximation. Stats can give us a sense of clarity in an overwhelming world by reducing down complexity into much more easily parsed, quantitative data, often presented in an easy to visualise manner. It feels objective. However, statistics only serve to mask the underlying bias in what data we choose to collect, who collects it, and how — which means that treating statistics as objective can be dangerous due to making us less aware of biases and inequality, and thus even less objective.

I like the way that the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway puts it; she describes data visualisations as "the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere"^[4][5]. I'mma quote a long passage from an excellent book here, because I don't think I can explain it any better than this:

"The view from nowhere—from a distance, from up above, like a god—may be data visualization’s most signature feature. It’s also the most ethically complicated to navigate for the ways in which it masks the people, the methods, the questions, and the messiness that lies behind clean lines and geometric shapes. Haraway calls it a trick because it makes the viewer believe that they can see everything, all at once, from an imaginary and impossible standpoint. But it’s also a trick because what appears to be everything, and what appears to be neutral, is always what she terms a partial perspective. And in most cases of seemingly “neutral” visualizations, this perspective is the one of the dominant, default group." ^[5]

To bring things back to our question, I strongly believe that we don't know if men commit more crime than women. I think it's plausible that it could be true, but due to inherent bias in how the data behind these statistics are gathered (i.e. documented inequalities in policing and sentencing), we simply don't know. Statistics always carries this problem of bias being hidden in the data, but it's especially tricky when dealing with complex socioeconomic matters such as crime. To me, this is a standout example of an area where we need to be especially cautious that we don't mistake the stats for truth.

[1]: Open Access Academic Paper:
"Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence", (2023), Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01370

[2]: More accessible summary of [1]
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/smartphone-records-reveal-racial-disparities-in-neighborhood-policing/

[3]: Paywalled Academic Paper:
"Gender Disparities in Sentencing", (2020), Arnaud Philippe
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12333
Unpaywalled SciDB mirror via Anna's Archive

[4]: More accessible summary of [3], by Michelle Kilfoyle and Arnaud Philippe
https://ceps.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2021/11/17/gender-stereotypes-see-female-criminals-fare-better-in-court/

[5]: Old Academic Paper:
“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599
Quote and reference retrieved via [6]

[6]: Open Access Book "Data Feminism", (2020), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein
Fairly academic, but also quite accessible to anyone interested in how socioeconomic inequality shapes how we use data, and how data feeds inequality. I highly recommend this book, it is excellent
Quoted section found here

And on the off chance one of you delightful nerds would like to read more, here is a link to the main book page, for your convenience:
https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/

^(It's funny that now I'm no longer in academia, I seem to have fun writing cited essays. Though to be fair, I studied biochemistry, so this is outside of my main wheelhouse — which is probably why I'm so diligent with citing my claims)

Since the stats are only by who gets caught, I can't be sure that men actually commit more crime as opposed to simply more men get caught. Maybe women are simply better at crime. 🤷‍♂️

/s

Can anyone even measure the amount of crime committed?

Or is it only the crimes caught, and charged in a court of law.

Because they are not the same thing.

Men are more likely to face real poverty and get no help from anybody. Suicide, crime rates are just derivatives of it

Women are better are covering it up. I think men are more prone to acts of passion or random bouts of rage, which is difficult to plan for and cover up. It's often public, loud and messy. Women internalize from an early age that this is not acceptable behaviour if you're not male, so we reign it in more. But that doesn't mean the crimes aren't committed, we're just always cognizant of the social fallout if we're discovered.

Anyone who has worked in a retirement home can tell you there are some very sweet ladies who will, on or near their deathbed, tell you how they killed their abusive husband decades ago. Or they share the story like words of wisdom to the younger generation.

I think a lot of women have been put in a corner by society, so they don't feel a pressing need to play by the rules all the time.

Criminals tend to be on the extreme end of the bell curve for violence, and men's bell curve for violence is slightly shifted up compared to women. In the end, that means the extreme outliers for all the most disagreeable and violent individuals are men (like 99%) and the same is true on the opposite end but for women.

Men also have a slightly broader bell curve for intelligence, so the same applies for the extreme end of intelligence. All of the dumbest people alive are primarily men. The Venn diagram of low intelligence and agreeableness, along with impulsiveness means most criminals are men.

They’re more capable of doing so.

It's not possible to measure committed crimes. If anyone parrots some crime statistics without limiting themselves to violent crimes it's 100% bullshit. Crime statistics just measure convictions. Violent crime rates often times include unsolved murders and assaults.

Even in more progressive areas boys are socialized differently. I’ve been in a field where I see early childhood until middle school for years now. And girls, from the beginning, and raised more strictly. They have more care in their clothes, their meals, and the skills they are taught. They rarely fight, and if they do, it’s not on impulse. My theory on why people often say “boys are easier” is because they absolutely neglect them. So the onus is on 3rd parties to often teach them basic skills and rule following, to control their impulses, etc. Even in K-5, boys are the ones who are telling their teachers to fuck off, leaving the buildings without permission, fighting, etc. Parents blame the teacher/staff, if they are present at all, and antisocial behavior gets rewarded again and again.

Societal expectations for one thing. We're also conditioned into suppressing our emotions. Many men don't have healthy outlets.

Men are generally more aggressive

Women have generally chosen said more aggressive men to reproduce with

I guess the more aggressive men are more likely to rape and get women pregnant which increases the chance of their aggressive nature to survive. This is why abortion rights are crucial among other reasons - getting rid of the plague of moronic sexual behaviors that genetically promote violence

And now we're here

For violent crimes it's probably just that men are on average stronger and more aggressive (at least they were a few decades ago).
For white collar crimes, higher positions with more criminal opportunity still are usually held by men. More opportunity means more abuse of opportunity.
On the low economic end, poor men are less likely to be able to benefit from help for internal and external reasons than poor women. So survival crimes are more likely to be done by men, too.
Men on average seem to also feel more the need for speed and are more risk affine. So they likely get more speeding tickets.

Different reasons for different types of crimes. There probably are also crimes that are more often committed by women or where the gender gap is insignificant. But nobody talks about crimes committed by women. So no idea whether women are even capable of committing crimes at all.

Because ~85% of males could physically overpower ~85% of females.

Young men too polite and well behaved to physically engage with women may underestimate the difference , and they may be taken by common movie tropes where a little girl is a secret martial arts master and beats the shit out of fifteen guys. But in real life the physical difference is enormously biased towards men and boys.

Men and boys know this and so they are more likely to try crimes. Women and girls know this and so they are less likely to try. This knowledge comes into play both when considering the crime, and when considering the law enforcement response to those crimes. (“I could overpower/slip away from / outrun that cop!”)

This explains the disparity in violent crime, but also leads to an overall mindset that explains nonviolent crime.