I'm referring to two main facts:

Having the perpetrator be a man results in harsher sentencing for him (more jail time and/or and more likely to get jail time in the first place).

Source 1:

If you're a criminal defendant, it may help—a lot—to be a woman. At least, that's what Prof. Sonja Starr's research on federal criminal cases suggests. Prof. Starr's recent paper, "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases," looks closely at a large dataset of federal cases, and reveals some significant findings. After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper. [http://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_gender_disparities.aspx]

Source 2:

Last, blacks and males are also less likely to get no prison term when that option is available; less likely to receive downward departures; and more likely to receive upward adjustments and, conditioned on having a downward departure, receive smaller reductions than whites and females. [http://people.terry.uga.edu/mustard/sentencing.pdf]

Source 3:

For both property and drug offending, females are less likely to be sentenced to prison and also receive shorter sentences if they are sentenced to prison. For violent offending, however, females are no less likely than males to receive prison time, but for those who do, females receive substantially shorter sentences than males. [http://works.bepress.com/gang_lee/5/]

Having the victim be a woman results in harsher sentencing for the perpetraor as well.

Source 1:

The authors of this study found that the gender of the victim was a statistically significant predictor of death penalty decisions in Georgia, net of controls for crime seriousness, the offender’s prior record, and other legally relevant factors. Offenders convicted of crimes against females were more than two and a half times more likely to be sentenced to death than offenders convicted of crimes against males (Williams et al. 2007:877) [http://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/27008_4.pdf]

Source 2:

In particular, victim characteristics are important determinants of sentencing among vehicular homicides, where victims are basically random and where the optimal punishment model predicts that victim characteristics should be ignored. Among vehicular homicides, drivers who kill women get 56 percent longer sentences. Drivers who kill blacks get 53 percent shorter sentences. [http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/the_determinants_of_punishment_deterrence_incapacitation_and_vengeance.pdf]

Source 3:

Using data for offenders convicted of three violent crimes in the seven largest metro counties in Texas in 1991, the authors find evidence that offenders who victimized females received substantially longer sentences than offenders who victimized males. Results also show that victim gender effects on sentence length are conditioned by offender gender, such that male offenders who victimize females received the longest sentence of any other victim gender/offender gender combination. However, whereas these effects are observed for sentence length, no victim gender effects are observed on whether offenders received an incarcerative or nonincarcerative sentence. [http://works.bepress.com/gang_lee/9/]

Question: How do you interpret these facts? How does your movement, ideology, world-view, or theoretical framework help us understand these facts? What concepts do you think are useful for understanding them?

Bonus: Similar effects have been found for race (with black people being in a similar position to men and white people being in a similar position to women). In what ways do you analyze or see the racial biases in the same way as the gender biases, and in what ways do you analyze or see them differently?