Gender Equality and Female Offending: Evidence From International Data Sources.

This paper examines the nature of female offending patterns in relationship to societal gender equality using cross-national analysis of 27 European countries for the year 2006. Importantly, our analysis uses a conceptually innovative indicator (the World Economic Forum's ) to determine relative levels of gender equality. Results show that countries with a narrower gender gap in the indexes of political empowerment were likely to have a higher female prosecution rate, and that political empowerment was also significantly associated with female conviction rates as well as rates of property offending.