Gender Roles and Criminality: Some Critical Comments

This paper investigates the recent claim that women are becoming increasingly involved in aggressive or serious criminal activities. On the basis of an a priori classification of aggressive crimes, a review of three different types of data reveals no unambiguous pattern of change in women\u27s criminality. Several theoretical problems which hove inhibited the systematic development of the relationships between gender roles and criminality are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the lack of conceptual precision that characterizes the use of the terms gender and aggressive crime

Sex Roles and Criminality: Science or Conventional Wisdom?

It is argued that past theoretical work on female crime and delinquency has employed and built upon a set of nonrational sexist assumptions which have rarely been explicitly articulated in the work itself. And yet the theory on female misconduct cannot be adequately comprehended without an awareness of this accompanying set of assumptions. Until these ideas are critically examined and subjected to empirical scrutiny, progress will not be made in understanding female criminality and the allegation that it is on the increase

Gender Role Expectations of Juveniles

This paper discusses the development of two five-item Likert scales that classify juveniles\u27 gender role expectations as highly traditional to nontraditional. One is composed of behavioral expectations that juveniles define as traditionally feminine and the other is composed of expectations they define as traditionally masculine. With a sample of junior and senior high school students, correlational and factor analyses of scale items were conducted to assess the validity of the assumptions of bipolarity and unidimensionality common in theoretical conceptualizations of gender roles. The results suggest that feminine and masculine role expectations are not bipolar opposites and do not form a unidimensional continuum

Masculinity and Delinquency

A strong positive association between masculinity and delinquency is on important assumption in theories which explain why (1) males are more delinquent than females and (2) females are becoming increasingly delin-quent. Self-report measures obtained from 1002 junior and senior high school students from a large Southeastern city constitute the data for an examination of the first of these relationships. Factor analytic procedures were used to identify the components of masculinity: leadership, aggressive-ness, competitiveness, ambitiousness, and successfulness. Separate models of masculinity, opportunity, attachment to conventional others, and belief in the moral validity of low are constructed for status, property, and aggressive offenses. For females, masculinity has no direct effects on any type of delinquency. For males, masculinity is directly related only to status offenses. The results are inconsistent with analyses of females\u27 delinquency that emphasize their adoption of masculine characteristics

Barriers to Work Among the Elderly: A Connecticut Study

This study examines interest in labor force participation among persons age 55 and over in Connecticut. Phone interviews with 818 low-income elderly were conducted in 1984 to examine participation patterns and perceived barriers to employment. We found that reasons for not working involved predominantly situational factors such as personal health, problems with transportation, and issues relating to qualifications for training. Regression analysis indicated that the strongest predictors of an interest in work are the connection between training opportunities and good jobs, perceived income adequacy, willingness on the part of the worker to work on weekends, and having the appropriate qualifications for a job. Implications for social intervention and policy development for older workers are discussed

The job satisfaction of older workers

Older workers re‐entering the workforce and those changing jobs are coming to play an increasingly important role in the labor force, especially as part‐time workers. Yet the work orientation and job satisfaction of these workers has not been studied. Do ‘situational’ factors such as skill and pay matter for this subgroup of workers, and if so, which ones? If significant factors exist, can their effect be explained by the mediating influence of ‘dispositional’ factors like work values? This paper explores these questions in a study of 198 older workers who had begun new, mostly part‐time jobs. Regression analysis shows that the intrinsic indicators for skill and autonomy have a positive effect on job satisfaction. No extrinsic factor was significantly related to satisfaction, indicating that these workers are more than ‘instrumentally’ oriented. This support for a ‘situational’ interpretation of the impact of work, especially intrinsic features, was sustained in analyses which incorporated work values. To the extent that the growing number of part‐time jobs are relatively low‐skilled, and to the extent that older workers in new jobs are influenced most by intrinsically rewarding work, there appears to be a growing mismatch between an occupational niche and those who are being sought to fill it