{"id":64021,"date":"2014-09-18T09:00:04","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T14:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=64021"},"modified":"2015-02-01T03:16:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-01T08:16:17","slug":"why-dont-more-women-commit-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/09\/18\/why-dont-more-women-commit-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Don’t More Women Commit Fraud?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women in the U.S. have made some monumental gains at work.\u00a0 We\u2019re now at least half the labor force and more women today are middle- and upper- managers in corporate America.\u00a0 Even so, I wasn\u2019t surprised to discover that women have not (yet) made similar inroads into high-level corporate\u00a0crime.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Rather, it\u2019s \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d when it comes to who is responsible for orchestrating and carrying out major corporate frauds.<\/p>\n

For the American Sociological Review<\/em>, Darrell Steffensmeier, Michael Roche,\u00a0and I studied<\/a> accounting malpractices like security fraud, insider trading, and Ponzi schemes in America\u2019s public companies to find out just how involved women were in these conspiracies.\u00a0 The Corporate Fraud Task Force indicted 436 individuals involved in 83 such schemes during July 2002 to 2009.\u00a0 We read and recorded information from indictments and other documents or reports that described who was involved and what they did.<\/p>\n

I expected the share of women in corporate fraud to be low \u2013 definitely less than the near-half that are women among (low-profit) embezzlers arrested each year\u2013 like your bank teller or local non-profit treasurer.\u00a0\u00a0 However, I was surprised that women corporate fraudsters were about as rare as female killers or robbers \u2013 less than 10% of those sorts of offenders. \u00a0Of the 400+ indicted for corporate fraud, only 37 were women.<\/p>\n

Most of these frauds were complex enough to require co-conspiracy over several years and a criminal division of labor.\u00a0 Often, women weren\u2019t included at all in these groups.\u00a0 When they were, they were nearly always in the minority, often alone, and most typically played rather small roles.<\/p>\n

The Enron conspiracy, for example, led to over 30 indictments; three were women and each played a minor role. The five women indicted among 19 in the HealthSouth fraud were in accounting-related positions and instructed by senior personnel to falsify financial books and create fictitious records. \u00a0Martha Stewart, rather than criminal mastermind of an insider trading conspiracy, committed \u201cone of the most ill-fated white-collar crimes ever\u201d in which she saved just $46,000 after receiving a stock-tip second-hand from her broker.<\/p>\n

Women were almost never the ringleader or even a major player in the fraud.\u00a0 Only one woman CEO led a fraud \u2013 the smallest fraud we studied \u2013 and two women with their husbands.\u00a0 One reason surely must be that women are not as often in positions to lead these schemes.\u00a0 However, even when we compared women and men in similar corporate positions, women were less likely to play leadership roles in the fraud. \u00a0Is there a\u00a0\u201cglass ceiling\u201d in the white-collar crime world?<\/p>\n

What most surprised me, however, was how little the women benefited from their illicit involvement.\u00a0 The wage gap in illicit corporate enterprise may be larger than in the legitimate job market.\u00a0 Over half the women did not financially gain\u00a0at all<\/i>\u00a0whereas half the men pocketed half a million dollars or more.\u00a0 The difference in illicit-gains persisted even if we compared women to their co-conspirators.\u00a0 Males profited much more. Women identified “gains” such as keeping one\u2019s job.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Even when women are in the positions to orchestrate these frauds, it\u2019s likely that the men who initiate these conspiracies prefer to bypass women, involving them in minor roles when need dictates or when trust develops through a close personal relationship.\u00a0 And women hardly initiated any schemes.\u00a0 Women business leaders tend to be more risk-averse and apt to stress social responsibility and equity, perhaps making corporate fraud unlikely.<\/p>\n

So,\u00a0would having more female leaders reduce corporate crime?\u00a0 We don\u2019t know, but we think it\u2019s likely.\u00a0 Women executives tend to make more ethical decisions, avoid excessive risk-taking, and create corporate cultures unsupportive of illegal business practices.\u00a0 Time will tell if, on the other hand, women moving up the corporate ladder increasingly adopt a wheeler-dealer, \u201cdominance at all costs\u201d corporate ethic.<\/p>\n

Some may be a little disappointed that women either cannot yet or do not exercise their power over others to illegally advance their business (and personal) interests as men have been doing for generations.\u00a0 There are moments when I catch myself \u201crooting\u201d for a more successful pink-collar offender \u2013 and examples exist.\u00a0 However, when I consider the destruction and havoc wrought on the U.S. economy and so many peoples\u2019 lives by these financial crimes, I am reminded that this is not the way in which I hope women wield power when business leadership roles are more equally shared.<\/p>\n

This posts originally appeared at the Gender & Society<\/a> blog.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jennifer Schwartz, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology at Washington State University. \u00a0Her research focuses on the gender and race demographics of criminal offenders, violence, and substance abuse.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Women in the U.S. have made some monumental gains at work.\u00a0 We\u2019re now at least half the labor force and more women today are middle- and upper- managers in corporate America.\u00a0 Even so, I wasn\u2019t surprised to discover that women have not (yet) made similar inroads into high-level corporate\u00a0crime. Rather, it\u2019s \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":64022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,55,2098,23679,2100,283,295,76],"class_list":["post-64021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-gender","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-gender-subordination","tag-gender-work","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-social-networks","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/08\/216.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64021"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64023,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64021\/revisions\/64023"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}