In the overwhelming majority of cases, offense seriousness alone determined remand outcome, regardless of the personal characteristics of the defendant; however, in those cases that fell on the "cusp" (offenses whose severity was marginal), gender was sometimes relevant to the remand decision. In such cases, magistrates' perceptions of female defendants' characters were significantly related to societal perceptions of normative gender roles. Women were typically perceived to be more "troubled" than men, which encouraged magistrates to use remand in cusp cases as an opportunity to help and support defendants. The skill of defense attorneys was the key in influencing magistrates' perceptions of women's characteristics. This was less likely to happen when the women were involved in unconventional family structures compared to those of the magistrates. Future research should determine whether different groups of magistrates' moral assessments of women vary with extra-legal factors and personal characteristics of the defendant, such as demeanor, race, nationality, class, and age. The current study was primarily a qualitative study of magistrates' decisionmaking in five courts in three metropolitan areas. Verbatim accounts of 103 remand hearings (untried defendants and convicted unsentenced defendants being remanded for reports) were analyzed along with 41 semistructured interviews with lay magistrates, Crown Prosecution Service officers, defense lawyers, and women living in a bail hostel. Since the study focused on the use of custodial remand, only cases in which women were at risk of being remanded in custody were observed; the police decision to hold a female defendant in custody overnight was used as a proxy indicator of this risk. 42 references