Women offenders have been silenced in scientific research for decades (Lorenzo, 2002). The quantitative gap that has always existed between male and female offending, as well as the sexist prejudices that have traditionally been held against women, led deviance theorists to ignore and even distort their specificities (Belknap, 2014).

Behind prison walls, their needs are often forgotten, and the spaces, security regimes and interventions respond to the male profile of most of the prison population (Ballesteros & Almeda, 2015; Lorenzo, 2002). In our country, women account for barely 7% of the total (Secretaría General de Instituciones Penitenciarias [SGIP], 2022), although this is a higher percentage than in Europe, as Spain is the member state of the European Union with the highest number of women prisoners (Aebi et al., 2022).

The studies that have analysed the characteristics of women offenders, mostly in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, point to profiles defined by gender and racial inequality and marked by poverty, family problems and violence (Wright et al., 2012). They are women with educational deficiencies, family responsibilities and economic difficulties (Jiménez & Yagüe, 2017) who have often suffered abuse at an early age or intimate partner violence (Caravaca-Sánchez et al., 2019). And this past is also frequently accompanied by diagnoses of mental illness and drug addiction (Fazel et al., 2016), which reduces their opportunities to lead a prosocial life.

On the other hand, one of the issues on which research on female offending is consistent is the differences between the profiles of the two genders. Male offending tends to be more varied and violent (Salisbury et al., 2009), while female offending focus on stick to specific typologies and is not accompanied by violence (Loeber et al., 2017). Women mainly commit offences against public health and property (Almeda, 2017), the latter usually involving petty theft.

However, adaptation to the prison regime is also different. Men pose a greater institutional risk, as conflicts are often resolved through physical violence and there are more escape attempts (Steiner & Wooldredge, 2009). In contrast, female inmates rarely get involved in assaults, fights or escapes. Their conflicts tend to be limited to disobeying orders from prison staff and arguing with other women (Chávez & Añaños-Bedriñana, 2018), which is often caused by the lack of internal separation in the women’s modules. In addition, greater psychological distress has been demonstrated in the female prison population, mainly due to separation from families and children (Lempert, 2016).

Thus, for years, the literature has pointed out that the consequences of incarceration are more pernicious for women, not only because the system does not adapt to their characteristics or respond effectively to their needs (Lorenzo, 2002), but also because it generates a very marked destructuring of the family (Belknap, 2014). Furthermore, by receiving shorter sentences, the resocialising purpose of prison ends up losing its significance.

In this context, it is necessary to analyse whether the socio-educational intervention developed in prison is adapted to the needs and characteristics of women. In this work we aim to study their participation in the socio-educational interventions of prison and to identify their perceptions of gender discrimination during incarceration. This work is part of a doctoral thesis which is being supported by the Government of Spain through a pre-doctoral contract for “University Professor Training” (FPU17/00373).

In this descriptive study, 376 women inmates in various Spanish prisons participated. In order to access them, we opted for a two-stage sampling. At a first level, we chose the penitentiary centres, following a purposive sampling. Given that in Spain female prisoners can serve their sentences in both women’s modules of ordinary prisons and in women’s centres, we included in our study the three women’s prisons of the General State Administration and four ordinary prisons with a women’s module. At the second level, we selected the female inmates of these centres by means of an accidental sampling. In total, 720 inmates were part of the invited sample, although the data-producing sample was reduced to 376. For the study, we designed a questionnaire consisting of 35 questions organised in seven blocks: 1. Socio-demographic data (7 questions). 2. Family profile (7 questions). 3. Educational and employment profile (4 questions). 4. Offending profile (4 questions). 5. Intervention needs (9 questions). 6. Socio-educational intervention in prison (7 questions). 7. Expectations for release (2 questions). The fieldwork was carried out between September and December 2021, after obtaining the corresponding permissions from the Bioethics Committee of the University of Santiago de Compostela and the SGIP.

The descriptive analysis of the participation of women in the socio-educational intervention of prisons allows us to extract the following data: 67% are enrolled in some course of official education, basically in Secondary Education or Adult Literacy; 47.1% are employed in productive workshops; 72% participate in training programmes, with a concentration in certain feminised activities (sewing or hairdressing); and 56.7% are involved in specific intervention programmes, with drug addiction treatment and the prevention of gender violence standing out. With regard to their perceptions of gender discrimination in prison, and focusing on the programmes and activities that comprise the socio-educational intervention, we can conclude the following: in general terms, the inmates state that there is a very limited offer of programmes specifically aimed at women; but some also consider that they cannot participate in the socio-educational intervention with the same opportunities as male inmates, that the programmes are not adapted to their needs, and that equality between men and women is not promoted. Contrasting these data with the type of prison, we found a statistically significant relationship in the perception of discrimination in programmes and activities, r(376) = .36, p < .01, with inmates in male prisons perceiving a situation of greater discrimination. In the light of these results, it is possible to affirm that incarcerated women are subject to a series of situations of inequality that hinder, on the one hand, the development of programmes adapted to the gender perspective and, on the other, their equal access to all the activities in which men can participate.

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