Study: Glass Ceiling True For Female White Collar Criminals

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Today's Last Word In Business is criminal glass ceiling. A new study suggests that female white collar crooks face the same barriers as their law-abiding counterparts in the corporate world.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

A team of researchers from Penn State studied the involvement of women in recent corporate fraud cases. It found women held inferior positions in criminal conspiracies, and profited significantly less from their misdeeds.

WERTHEIMER: On average, the researchers say that male fraudsters pocket half a million dollars or more. By contrast, more than half of the women didn't get a dime for being involved in bad behavior.

MONTAGNE: Instead, many of the women took illegal actions to, say, save their company from impending bankruptcy - or to make their firm look better to stockholders. Of 159 people identified as, quote, "ringleaders" in the cases studied, only three were women.

WERTHEIMER: The research shows that even in white collar crime, women are marginalized. And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.