Although women have made dramatic gains toward equality with men over the past century, this progress has occurred alongside tremendous growth in U.S. incarceration rates. Extending prior research on sex differences in offending, we turn our attention to punishment by exploring how gender equality in education, work, and politics is associated with disparities in annual prison admissions. Using pooled cross-sectional data for U.S. states from 1983 to 2010, we conduct a series of fixed-effects regressions to estimate the ratio of female-to-male annual prison admission rates, as well as sex-specific rates, disaggregated by violent, property, and drug crimes. We find partial support for the ameliorative hypothesis, which predicts that increasing gender equality will decrease female incarceration rates relative to male rates. For one of our three measures of gender equality—the sex gap in educational attainment—we find that greater equality is associated with a widening of the sex gap in incarceration rates, particularly for property offenses. We explore the implications of these findings in relation to existing theories of gender, crime, and punishment.

中文翻译：

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性别平等和男女入狱率的差距*

尽管在过去的一个世纪里，女性在与男性平等方面取得了巨大的进步，但这一进步伴随着美国监禁率的巨大增长而发生。扩展先前关于犯罪性别差异的研究，我们通过探索教育、工作和政治中的性别平等如何与年度入狱人数差异相关联，将注意力转向惩罚。使用 1983 年至 2010 年美国各州的汇总横截面数据，我们进行了一系列固定效应回归，以估计女性与男性的年度入狱率以及按暴力分类的性别比率，财产和毒品犯罪。我们发现对改善假设的部分支持，该假设预测增加性别平等将降低女性监禁率相对于男性监禁率。对于我们衡量性别平等的三个指标之一——受教育程度的性别差距——我们发现更大的平等与监禁率的性别差距扩大有关，尤其是在财产犯罪方面。我们探讨了这些发现对现有的性别、犯罪和惩罚理论的影响。