Estimating the Effect of Sexism on Perceptions of Property, White-Collar, and Violent Crimes

Prior research on the role of gender in perceptions of crime and sentencing has focused primarily on judicial outcomes (i.e., empirical differences in male/female sentencing), and some theorists have proposed the chivalry thesis to explain differential outcomes for male and female offenders. Although a prominent theory, the empirical validity of the chivalry thesis has been under scrutiny for decades. In light of this, I argue that gender differences in sentencing can be understood through examination of sexist attitudes and beliefs, and how these sexist attitudes and beliefs interact with characteristics of the offense and the offender to influence perceptions of crime and appropriate sentencing. To test this assertion, 671 respondents were assessed according to their sexist attitudes along both the benevolent and hostile dimensions of sexism, as well as to their perceptions of a series of violent, white collar, and property crime vignettes. Sexism scores were hypothesized not only to share significant associations with respondent's perceptions of crime, but also to interact with the type of crime committed and the gender of the offender to influence respondent's perceptions of the crimes in the vignettes. Results based on ordered logistic regressions suggest that both benevolent and hostile sexist attitudes interact with the type of crime committed and the gender of the offender to influence perceptions of crime seriousness, and sentence severity. Furthermore, when controlling for type of crime and sexist attitudes, female offenders tended to be given harsher ratings than men for violent and property crimes. When controlling for crime type and the gender of the offender, respondents with higher benevolent sexism scores perceived violent and property crimes to be more serious and thought sentencing should be more severe than either non-sexists, or respondents with higher hostile sexism scores. Finally, hostile sexists gave the harshest ratings for white-collar crime vignettes. Implications for existing theories and future studies are discussed