Angry women and empathic men : How individuals "do gender" in a criminal justice context through conformity or resistance to gendered feeling rules

Studies on gender differences in public punitiveness show that women generally hold less punitive attitudes toward offenders than men. The reverse is true, however, when it comes to ‘back-end’ criminal justice processes, like parole, that involve the early release of prisoners. With evidence to suggest that differing emotional responses may help to explain gender gaps like these, this study draws on the concepts of gendered feeling rules and emotion management, together with the notion of gender as a performance, to explore how men and women enact their gendered identity through emotion in a criminal justice context. The findings highlight the salience of emotions like fear, anger, and empathy to gender differences in public support for parole. Further, they show that while both men and women perform gender by conforming to gendered emotion expectations, they also resist traditional emotion norms.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).