Gender Equality and Gendered Homicides

An important insight from the feminist literature is that a particular form of inequality—gender inequality—is likely to be associated with a distinctive type of violence—gendered violence. Previous research has demonstrated that rates of a quintessential gendered crime, rape, are related to the relative status of men and women. The article extends this earlier work by examining the effects of gender equality on the “gendering” of lethal violence. The authors examine the applicability of two feminist hypotheses, the ameliorative hypothesis and the backlash hypothesis, for lethal violence. Regression analyses for a sample of cities indicate that gender equality is positively related to rates of male killings of females and male killings of other males in southern cities. Conversely, gender equality is negatively associated with male killings of other males in cities located in other regions. These cross-sectional analyses thus offer some support for the backlash hypothesis on gender stratification and violence but also point to the complexity of the structural relationships.