Men commit more crimes than women do. A lot more. In America, the incarceration capital of the world (over 2 million detainees), males comprise 93% of the prison population. This disparity between the sexes is particularly stark when it comes to murder: 90% of the time, the ones who do the killing are men. All these numbers add up to what criminologists call the “gender gap”.
But read enough academic journals and government crime reports, and some curious facts emerge: while crime rates in the western world have steadily declined over the past three decades, the number of young women being convicted for violent crimes in some western countries has increased significantly; law enforcement records indicate the opposite is true for their male counterparts. In other words, the gender gap is closing.
A 2017 report by the Institute For Criminal Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London came up with this sobering data point: the global female prison population has surged by more than half since the turn of the century, while the male prison population increased by just a fifth over that same period. Women and girls may account for only 7% of all incarcerated people today, but their numbers are now growing at a much faster rate than at any time in recorded history.
