Even in white collar crime, female crooks face a glass ceiling

From the Pew Research Center:

Female white-collar crooks face the same glass ceiling as their law-abiding peers in the corporate world: They typically hold inferior positions to men in the criminal conspiracies in which they are engaged, rarely lead a fraud ring and make significantly less money for their dirty deeds than their male accomplices.

No wonder so few women get mixed up in corporate fraud.

Steffensmeier and his team studied the involvement of women in recent corporate frauds using an unique database created by the federal government in the wake of the multi-billion dollar Enron scandal in 2001.

The data set includes 83 fraud cases involving 436 defendants that were initiated from 2002 through 2009 by the multi-agency federal Corporate Fraud Task Force. Individual case records included the names of defendants, characteristics of the company, the alleged scheme and the charges.

In all, they found that only 37 women were indicted in connection with these corporate frauds, or about 9% of all offenders.

Females in the conspiracy also occupied lower rungs of the corporate ladder—often in accounting or finance positions—and played similarly secondary roles in the conspiracy.

...These findings, the researchers argue, mirrors sex segregation and the marginalization if women in the overall labor market. “As a result, women are likely either excluded entirely from lucrative criminal conspiracies or are utilized in sex-typed ways,” they wrote.

Based on my personal observation the disparate impact is even more pronounced among races.

This is definitely an issue for the Department of Justice which should file a lawsuit under the disparate impact theory.