In a study of a Justice Department database of 83 corporate frauds from 2002 to 2009, researchers found that women were way less likely to take part in such crimes. Indeed, three-quarters of the conspiracies covered in the study were entirely male, but not one was entirely female. Of the 436 defendants in the study, fewer than one in 10 was a woman. "Men are disproportionately involved," says Darrell Steffensmeier, the lead author. (click below to read more)
When women were involved, they tended to play a minor supporting role—and to receive way less of any ill-gotten gains, even controlling for their generally lower corporate rank. While more than half of male defendants made at least $500,000, more than half the women made no personal profit. Some knowingly broke the law to help the company they worked for, or simply at the direction of a boss.
Only three of the women were identified by the researchers as conspiracy ringleaders, and only one of those three wasn't married to a male ringleader. By contrast, 156 of the men qualified as a ringleader. "Sex segregation in corporate criminality is pervasive," the researchers write.
The findings are consistent with previous research suggesting women tend to be more honest and less selfishly motivated than men. Earlier this year, for example, a study of research fraud in the life sciences found that men were disproportionally crooked. A Swedish study in 2007, meanwhile, found that men were a lot more likely than women to lie for monetary gain.
So will corporations get more ethical as more women rise into their highest ranks? Or will women increasingly adopt the same dog-eat-dog ethos that seems to be more common among men? Only time will tell.
Gender and Twenty-First-Century Corporate Crime: Female Involvement and the Gender Gap in Enron-Era Corporate Frauds, Darrell J. Steffensmeier, Jennifer Schwartz and Michael Roche, American Sociological Review (June)
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