The gendering of fraud: an international investigation

Changing workplace demographics reflect a rising number of women in the traditionally male-dominated field of business. The purpose of this study is to investigate how upwardly mobile women may impact the commission and type of white-collar crime, contributing to the scarce literature on gender distinctions in criminal behavior while comparing criminal trends globally. Women’s increased representation in positions of power in business provides them with increased fraud opportunities prompting the authors to ask: in their areas of opportunity, do women and men commit the same types of white-collar crime and at the same rates, and how does this phenomena vary globally?

Using a database from the Institute for Fraud Prevention, 5,441 fraud cases are examined from 93 nations for the annual periods from 2002 until 2011. Ordinal logistic regression methods are used to test for differences in gendered criminal behavior by fraud offense type controlling for age, position, education, compensation level and country context.

Internationally, results from the study indicate that female fraudsters are three times more likely than male fraudsters to commission crimes of asset misappropriation in the workplace. Upon further investigation, stratifying the data by geographical region, findings from the study demonstrate that female fraudsters are more likely than male fraudsters to commit asset misappropriation in the following geographical regions: Africa (three times as likely), Asia (twice as likely), Canada (three times as likely), China (five times as likely), Europe (twice as likely), the Middle East (four times as likely), Oceania (four times as likely), the United Kingdom (eight times as likely) and the United States of America (twice as likely).

Evidence from this study should be of importance to multinational enterprises, auditors and fraud examiners, as asset misappropriation constitutes 87 per cent of all fraud cases globally. Further, these findings prompt the need for researchers to develop this area of research.