Late last week, Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, trumpeted what he clearly considered was a big win for his office — the conviction of Anna Sorokin, the fictitious heiress, the party-girl swindler, the Robin Hood tipper, the danger to minibars.

A jury found her guilty of grand larceny in the second and third degrees as well as most of the other charges that had been leveled against her. As Mr. Vance put it in his accompanying announcements, Ms. Sorokin committed “real white-collar felonies” and as a consequence would now face “real justice.”

Anna Sorokin committed real white-collar felonies over the course of her lengthy masquerade. Now she will face real justice for her many thefts and lies. https://t.co/TLOBYX0ILm

“Real justice,” in this instance, is the prospect of more than 15 years in prison for defrauding wealthy acquaintances and financial institutions of $200,000, the sum of which would barely allow you to buy a studio apartment in Queens. “She stole from banks,” one of the prosecutors argued during the trial as if to suggest she had taken oatmeal from the mouth of a baby. “She tried to steal from a hedge fund.”

Setting aside the dubious rhetorical gambit of soliciting sympathy for banks and hedge funds, Ms. Sorokin was clearly going to take a fall even if so many other white-collar villains still had their freedom.

Here is where we might recall that only one financial executive in the country, Kareem Serageldin, was ever sent to prison in conjunction with the collapses of moral judgment that caused the undoing of the global economy in 2008. Accused of concealing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses of mortgage-backed securities, to inflate his bonus at Credit Suisse, he also faced real justice. He was sentenced to 30 months.

Increasingly, it seems, the law has provided an able hand to a culture that takes perverse, outsize pleasure in spectacles of female desperation. Like many young women, Ms. Sorokin had an insatiable desire to be something that she wasn’t: in her case, someone other than the daughter of a Russian HVAC salesman. She had come to New York without the pedigree or capital that buoys you in a city poisonously obsessed with status. New York is a transactional place, and Ms. Sorokin had nothing to trade, so she made herself into a rich, clubby, entrepreneurial German and lied and cheated a system already allocating so many unfair advantages.

When Mr. Vance was elected district attorney nine years ago, he promised to come down with the force of a broken dam on the rich and powerful. Many would say he has fallen short of that goal. In 2012 he backed away from an investigation of Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both suspected of misleading potential buyers of condominiums in a Trump building in SoHo. Earlier he chose not to bring Dominique Strauss-Kahn to trial when the former director of the International Monetary Fund was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

Nor did Mr. Vance call for arrest or prosecution of Harvey Weinstein in 2015 when he first had the chance. At the time, a police report had a young model claiming that the producer had groped her in his office. Mr. Vance moved on.

But now he can claim victory in a high-profile case against a 28-year-old female immigrant who went after the things so many other people also seemed to acquire unscrupulously.

It is hard not to trip over the parallels between Ms. Sorokin’s story and Lori Loughlin’s starring role in the current scandal around college admissions. Like Ms. Sorokin, she was a child of the working class, driven to the dark side by a compulsion for something everyone else around her in the moneyed quarters of Los Angeles seemed to have — in this case, prestigiously educated children who didn’t always get where they were going by virtue of their own showstopping achievements.

That she has received so much more public scrutiny than William Singer, the profiteering architect of the scheme to channel mediocre rich children to top colleges, suggests how much we loathe the blithely entitled. But it also underscores how poorly we balance our contempt for the unchecked aspirations of women against the twisted rapaciousness of men.

Just this week an article in The Los Angeles Times outlined the many plans for noble businesses that Mr. Singer was developing before the admissions scandal got in the way. They included affordable college-counseling services for ordinary families and life-coaching for middle-aged women.

(Even I had to stop and momentarily commend the synergistic novelty of offering stressed-out moms the one-stop-shopping experience of advice about both hormone therapy and the Ivy League application process.)

It is almost certain that Ms. Loughlin, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her and could potentially wind up in prison for 40 years, will remain the face of smug privilege run amok. How much competition is there really? In 2015, the federal prosecution of white-collar crimes reached a 20-year low, down by nearly 4,000 annual cases in comparison with the mid-1990s.

More broadly, across populations, although men far outnumber women in jails and prisons, the growth rate for female incarceration has been twice as high as that of men since 1980. Mostly it is poor women who are locked up, often for drug offenses and property crimes in which they were doing the bidding of male overlords.

While it is easy to see how Ms. Sorokin, who was dressed by a stylist for her trial, and Ms. Loughlin, an actress living in a mansion shot by Elle Decor, would inspire schadenfreude, what do we make of the fate of Bridget Anne Kelly, an average woman and single mother of four?

Just over a week ago, she was given a 13-month prison sentence for her role in New Jersey’s Bridgegate scandal. In 2013, she was a high-ranking aide to Gov. Chris Christie when a plot was set in motion to incapacitate traffic on the George Washington Bridge as a means of political revenge.

The following year, a report commissioned by the former governor himself put her at the center of the trouble, portraying Ms. Kelly as a duplicitous and overly emotional weeper addicted to male approval. Mr. Christie, now a TV pundit, was never charged, and David Wildstein, who acknowledged that he came up with the plan for the bridge closing, was sentenced to probation and 500 hours of community service.

At her recent sentencing hearing, Ms. Kelly asked for home confinement, citing how much her children have already suffered as a result of her ordeal. She did not get it. Several days later, the world learned that a bus driver in Watertown, N.Y., who raped a 14-year-old girl would be spared a prison sentence. He would be remanded to probation instead.

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Ginia Bellafante on Twitter: @GiniaNYT

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