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Awakening from androcentrism: calls for measurement of gender and sexuality in criminology

In recent years, calls have been made to progress the inclusivity of criminology, a field historically dominated by males. While specialty journals, such as Feminist Criminology, permit and encourage inclusive and progressive conceptualizations of social constructs such as gender and sexuality, these recent calls have noted mainstream criminology’s historical reluctance to such progress. The current study examined articles published in the past five years in a mainstream criminological journal and a well-respected victimization journal to examine inclusion and conceptualization of gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality were included more in the diversity-focused victimization journal that was analyzed, compared to the mainstream criminological journal analyzed. However, conceptualizations of these constructs in both journals rarely fell outside of a binary measure, which suggests that the measurement and inclusion of gender and sexuality are still lacking, and within the field of criminology and victimology calls for inclusivity have not been fully heeded.