Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 93

“The gendered structure of white-collar crime is, perhaps, the least studied topic in the field of criminology” (Dodge, 2013, p. 197).¹ Kathleen Daly’s (1989) classic study of WCC convictions in U.S. federal courts was the first feminist analysis to dissect what appeared as a gender-neutral offense in much of the research, and still often does when simply looking at percentages. Daly’s (1989) study found that women constituted 45% of bank embezzlement convictions, but less than one fifth of the convicted offenders in the remaining WCCs (18% of postal fraud, 15% of credit fraud, 15% of false claims, 6% of tax fraud, 5% of bribes, 2% of security frauds, and 0.5% of anti-trust crimes). Moreover, when she closely analyzed the these seemingly WCCs, she not only found major gender differences in WCC offenders, but also concluded that many of the women’s WCCs should not have been charged as WCCs because they were usually employed as clerical workers (men were usually employed as managers and administrators); most (60%) of the convicted embezzlers were bank tellers (only 14% of men embezzlers were tellers); their financial gains were significantly smaller (probably because their offenses were pettier and their share of co-offending WCCs were much smaller); and they were more likely to report “family need” as motivating their offense (Daly, 1989).

¹ Theft was addressed earlier, and WCC is theft, but it deserves its own section given the women’s liberation/emancipation hypothesis (WLEH) and assumptions about women’s financial and other “equalities.”

More recent research confirms many of Daly’s (1989) findings. A corporate crime study confirmed there are still far fewer opportunities for women, relative to men, to commit corporate crime, which is one reason they were only 9% of the defendants (Steffensmeier et al., 2013). A National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) study concluded that women’s larceny, fraud, forgery, and embezzlement arrests involved small financial gains, were primarily misdemeanors or low-level felony charges (not WCCs), and were disproportionately shoplifting, bad checks, and welfare/benefit fraud (men’s were disproportionately theft from motor vehicles, transportation fraud, and counterfeiting) (Steffensmeier, Harris, & Painter-Davis, 2015). Kristy Holtfreter (2005) conducted an analysis of three occupational fraud offenses (to determine if occupational fraud is a “typical” WCC): (1) asset misappropriation (theft or misuse of an organization’s assets), (2) corruption (employees wrongfully using their influence in business transactions to obtain benefits for themselves that were contrary to duties to their employer), and (3) fraudulent statements (falsification of the organization’s records or documents). Like Daly (1989), Holtfreter found that the less serious WCCs (in terms of dollar loss), asset misappropriation and corruption, were equally likely to be committed by women and men. However, fraudulent statements (the more serious offenses) were distinctly linked to being male, being educated, and holding a higher-level position in the organization, and thus more consistent with WCC.

A 2019 Pennsylvania court “low-level” WCC study reported that women constituted 42% (Cassidy & Gibbs, 2019), and both a 2012 Florida felony “low-level” WCC study (Van Slyke & Bales, 2013) and a 2019 U.S. sentencing study (Testa, 2019) reported that women constituted 49% of WCC offenders. This might indicate a converging gender gap, at least for “lower-level” WCCs, but it could also mean these researchers were using data with the same or similar problems as Daly’s (1989) data, which require further parsing to determine whether these are truly WCCs. Many mainstream criminologists have stressed, often without mentioning gender, that WCC research needs to distinguish between occupational crime and white-collar crime (Clinard & Quinney, 1973), and account for the seriousness of victimization and the organizational complexity (station), instead of lumping truly serious WCCs with petty offenses, such as low-level bank tellers pilfering small amounts of money at work (Reese & McDougal, 2018; Weisburd & Waring, 2001).

WCC is still a male-related crime, indeed a white-male-related crime, due to white men’s overrepresentation in position and opportunity in the elite corporate, political, and economic world (see Dodge, 2013, p. 198, for this explanation regarding gender, but not race). As noted in the previous chapter, embezzlement, typically considered a white-collar crime was the only solidly gender-neutral offense in the 2018 UCR data. As Dodge (2013) explains, women have “flourished” in embezzlement “due to low-level occupations such as bookkeepers, bank tellers, or secretaries who have access to company funds,” women who are not exactly in high-paying positions themselves (p. 200).