Exploring How Gender and Sex Are Measured in Criminology and Victimology: Are we Measuring What we Say we Are Measuring?

Abstract

Throughout the years, there have been sustained and increasing calls for criminology to become more inclusive in its research and measurements with the purpose of improving our knowledge of crime and victimization. The current study examined articles published in the past five years in a mainstream criminological journal and a well-respected victimization journal to explore the inclusion and operationalization of gender and sex. Findings indicate that measures of gender and sex were included more in the diversity-focused victimization journal compared to the mainstream criminological journal. In both journals, however, conceptualizations and operationalizations of these constructs rarely fell outside of a binary measure, which suggests the measurement and inclusion of gender are still lacking, and oftentimes when we say we are measuring gender we are actually still measuring sex.

Keywords:

• Gender

Notes

1 JIV’s submission guidelines specifically require “a discussion of diversity as it applies to the reviewed research,” and its website defines diversity as “human differences such as socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, language, nationality, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, geography, ability, age, and culture” (SAGE, 2020).

2 When questions arose about a specific case, both coders would examine the article and come to a unanimous decision.

3 The most common disagreement was whether gender as a “mention” or “theme.” If coder 1 marked it as a theme and coder 2 marked it as a mention this counted as two differences (not just one).

4 Author gender was deemed undeterminable if gender could not be assumed for all authors of a piece. If the gender was known for all but one author, that article was still coded as undeterminable author gender.