the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it’d be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats

This right here is what I’m arguing against. I’d go so far as to say applying this at a macro level is dangerous and destructive (and let me be clear I am not accusing you of doing anything dangerous or destructive, this has been a lovely conversation and I hope I carry no offense. A politician saying this would scare me, but talking about this in a small setting is interesting and productive).

What I have seen from your argument is the possibility for bias at a few different levels of hypothetical data. Now again I’ll caveat that this is not my area of expertise and I’m probably not doing a great job representing the body of literature, but let’s examine a few studies to hopefully demonstrate what I mean. In this study accessing women’s arrest rate for violent crime there are some interesting charts that help illustrate my point (which is largely unrelated to the focus of the paper). They came up with this set of graphs:

I’ll grant that these partially illustrate your point (the part I said I agreed with), the arrest rate for a crime is not necessarily tied to the act of doing the crime itself, and it does so by comparing victim reports of crime with arrest records as a victim report has nothing to do with if an arrest is made or not. Now you could also say that maybe it is less likely that a victim of a woman committing assault is less likely to report they were victimized along with them less likely being arrested. Sure I could even get behind that, but does that account for the 10-20 fold difference in both of them? That would be wild.

For an ever clearer example of this let’s look at another citation (shared author as before) looking at gender differences in drunk driving. In this analysis it was found that 30% of self-reported drunk drivers are women, 25% of DUI arrests are women, and 18% of legally intoxicated drivers in fatal crashes are women. Here we would need to come up with an explanation that up to triples the “real” counts of DUI driving for all three of these stats. We’d have to say well women are 2x less likely to self report than men (why?), they are 2x less likely to be pulled over for DUI (maybe because cops don’t target them as much?) , and that they are 3x less likely to cause accidents that result in death (I guess they are just better drunk drivers by a massive margin).

Even if there are potential for bias in the data you can then account for it with other studies, for the last point the cleanest way would be to ask “are women better at driving under the influence than men?” and a study that tried to tackle exactly that found that “women displayed greater impairment than men on all behavioral tests and also reported higher levels of subjective intoxication compared with men.”

Sure we could poke and prod at hypothetical biases in this data but just because you can generate a plausible explanation for bias doesn’t mean you should “largely disregard the stats”. The reason I claim this is dangerous at the macro level is because this is how you get climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, smoking and lung cancer deniers, and on and on. There are times where it is appropriate to raise eyebrows at statistical findings, but with something as clear cut as violent crime with men vs women it is not it.

Your reply here I pretty much agree with completely but you have moved the goal posts quite a bit from your initial comment.

What I’m gathering from your comment here is that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself. Totlally agree with that.

But your original point that we just don’t know if women actually commit less crime than men is not supported here as I don’t believe it was in your original comment. Virtually all the data I have seen (and I admit I’m nowhere near a subject expert on this) suggests men commit more crime then women. This goes beyond police searches, convictions, etc. Its everything. It is extremely unlikely that there is enough types of bias across the entire dataset of crime stats across the world to make it so women commit roughly the same amount of crime as men (or even more crazy MORE crime).

Now one of the big issues with this is that “crime” is a squishy definition, if we count speeding of 1mph over the limit than just the number of miles driven per gender would be enough to sway the stats. Cause everyone speeds all the time pretty much which is a “crime”

Basically all our data suggests that men commit more crime than women across the boars like the original poster said. I don’t necessarily disagree with your comments about bias in data, but your final conclusion I don’t think is accurate:

I strongly believe that we don’t know if men commit more crime than women. I think it’s plausible that it could be true…

Sure I don’t think we know this with 100% certainty but it is much more than plausible, it is with a high degree of confidence true. If all of the data points to one conclusion I don’t think it is very fair to throw your arms up and say there could be bias everywhere, show that there is bias across the board and then let’s try to account for the bias. I don’t even think you have shown there to be bias.

You also state

women are effectively undercounted if we’re talking about who commits more crime

This conclusion I don’t see proven in your analysis, racial bias does not equal gender bias and it’s quite a jump to use that as evidence. Also we have more data than just who is caught or who is sentenced, there are surveys asking if you have ever shoplifted (sure these need to be take with a grain of salt), there’s data about the suspected gender of a perpetrator of crime when it is initially reported. Etc. Etc.

It is a very important thing to keep in mind statistical data is not infallible and in some cases only slightly useful (self reported surveys). But if you take all that into account and look across the board we can be rather confident men commit more crime than women. Not 100% but probably 90%+

You introduce the possibility of bias but don’t really prove there actually is that bias in any data sets. This argument feels dangerous in the opposite direction of what Donna Haraway is warning about, you have taken weaknesses in the entire category of statistical data to throw their conclusions out entirely without having specific reasons to.

I would make the argument that it could actually be a means to align with affordable housing (although that would likely be very difficult in this current housing market). Managing a property is a service, you have to manage vacancies, repairs, rent collection, etc.

If you don’t offload this to a management company and do it all yourself it is technically feasible to make a profit from the labor of managing the property even when charging below market rate for the property (difficult to do right now, but after owning the property for a period of time definitely possible).

If you were to do this you would be directly combatting the affordable housing problem by introducing competition at a lower price (it would be a drop in the ocean, but it would be fighting for affordable housing).