A Multisite Examination of Youth Gang Membership: Does Gender Matter?*

The nature and extent of female involvement in gangs has been a relatively neglected area of criminological inquiry. Even more rare have been investigations of explanations of female gang participation. This neglect can be attributed, in large part, to a perception that the phenomenon is statistically rare and the behavior substantively unimportant. Our objectives in this research are twofold: to describe gang membership in a general survey of eighth‐grade students in a cross section of the United States and to examine differences between boys' and girls' attitudes associated with gang membership