Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases (2012)

> There's a prefessor at umich who studies this. I think I recall her saying that gender disparities in sentencing actually dwarfs the racial disparities that we hear about more often, but I can't find the link.

Is that Professor Sonja Starr?

https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...

> There are other studies that have shown gender disparity in criminal cases, but not as pronounced as Prof. Starr's findings. This is because she is looking at "a larger swath of the criminal justice process" in her analysis, she said. The paper states, "Existing studies have typically focused on single stages of the criminal process in isolation"—in particular, the judge's final sentencing decision. These studies compare actual sentencing outcomes after controlling for the recommended sentence associated with the defendant's ultimate conviction. The problem with this, Starr explains, is that "the key control variable is itself the result of a host of discretionary decisions made earlier in the justice process"—including prosecutors' charging and plea-bargaining decisions. Starr's research incorporates disparities found at those earlier stages, and finds that "more disparity is introduced at each phase of the justice process."

> After estimating the amount of disparity left unexplained by the arrest offense and other control variables, the paper explores "why these gaps exist—and, in particular, whether unobserved differences between men and women might justify them." Prof. Starr explores several potential mitigating factors, such as the "girlfriend theory" (that "[w]omen might be viewed as…mere accessories of their male romantic partners"), the role of women as primary caregivers to their children, and the "theory that female defendants receive leniency because they are more cooperative with the government." Although each of these theories found some support in the data, they did not appear capable of explaining anything close to the total disparity that Prof. Starr found.

I wish more people were open to hearing this sort of information.