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 Theoretical Criminology
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Doing and undoing gender in policing

Janet Chan, Sally Doran and Christina Marel
Theoretical Criminology 2010 14: 425
DOI: 10.1177/1362480610376408

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Vol. 14(4): 425–446; 1362–4806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480610376408

Doing and undoing gender in policing

JANET CHAN, SALLY DORAN AND CHRISTINA MAREL
University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract
This article assesses the utility of ‘doing gender’ as a framework for
examining gender issues in policing. Drawing on a longitudinal
study in an Australian police force, the article seeks to explain the
persistence of barriers to the integration of female officers after
decades of equal employment laws and policies. The interviews
make transparent the agency of male and female actors in sustaining
or resisting the status quo. While there are real benefits in opening
up the ‘doing gender’ framework to draw attention to contestations
and challenges to gender hierarchy as suggested by the notion of
‘undoing gender’, the article demonstrates the complexity of gender
practices in policing and rejects the posing of equality and
difference as mutually exclusive alternatives.

Key Words
doing gender • gender difference • gender equality • gender
identity • gender in policing

Introduction

Through equal employment opportunity and affirmative action policies, the

proportion of female police officers has increased substantially in western
democracies in recent years.1 Yet studies have shown that despite legislative
and policy advances, female officers have continued to face resistance and
barriers to their integration (Martin and Jurik, 1996/2006; Doran and
Chan, 2003; Silvestri, 2003, 2007). Sources of resistance have been traced
to different factors, including the nature of police work, women’s threat to
police image and men’s identity and the male-dominated police occupational

425
426 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

culture, while barriers to integration are embedded in the gendered nature

of police organization (Martin and Jurik, 1996/2006).
Chan with Devery and Doran (2003) have argued that traditional policing
takes for granted the crime-fighting and coercive nature of police work and
equates policing with physicality. This in turn leads to the assumption that
policing is naturally a man’s job (Heidensohn, 1992; Appier, 1998; Crank,
1998). Being female therefore has the potential to carry negative symbolic
capital in the field of policing. Women’s entry into police work has also been
regarded as a threat to the self-image of male officers and the public image
of police (Martin, 1980). Opposition to the integration of women in policing
reflects a struggle over the right to own the control of law and order, a right
assumed to be traditionally owned by men (Heidensohn, 1992). Resistance
is also based on a fear that citizens may defy female officers’ authority, which
could damage the public image of police (Martin, 1980). Prokos and Padavic
(2002) have argued that hegemonic masculinity2 is a ‘central defining con-
cept’ of American police culture. Their analysis of the ‘hidden curriculum’ of
the police academy in a rural US county shows that in spite of the apparently
gender-neutral formal curriculum, recruits were taught that ‘women are
naturally very different from men’ and thus it was acceptable to exclude,
denigrate and objectify women, and to disregard women in authority
(Prokos and Padavic, 2002: 454).
While police culture is neither homogeneous nor immune to change
(Chan, 1997; Chan et al., 2003), police work is carried out in a gendered
organization where ‘advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control,
action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in
terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine’
(Acker, 1990: 146). Reviewing research from several countries, Martin and
Jurik (1996/2006) have argued that police organizational policies and
practices such as recruitment and selection, training and assignment, per-
formance evaluation and promotion, have gendered police work to the
disadvantage of women. Westmarland’s (2001) research in the UK suggests
that even though ‘differential deployment’ is not an issue in the low status
operational police work, female officers are conspicuously absent in high
profile specialist departments that involve ‘cars, guns and horses’. As
Connell (2006) points out, the ‘patterning of gender relations’ in an organ-
ization—its ‘gender regime’ that encompasses gender division of labour,
gender relations of power, emotion and human relations, and gender cul-
ture and symbolism—may reproduce (or deviate from) the wider ‘gender
order’ of society.
Like masculine domination in the wider society, the domination of a
masculine order in policing is not seen as arbitrary, because the mythic
vision of police as crime fighters helps construct the perception that
biological differences lead naturally to the sexual division of labour. Even
though ‘the manly man or the womanly woman’ (Bourdieu, 2001: 23) is a
social artefact, both men and women are trapped in it: women either accept
their biological inferiority or strive to overcome it by becoming the manly
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 427

policewoman, while men take to risky behaviour to prove ‘they have balls’,
e.g. high speed chase, heavy drinking, and so on. Hence, the ‘logic of sexism’
associates masculinity with the dangerous ‘outside’ work of crime fighting,
and femininity with the safe ‘inside’ work of service and dispute resolution
(Martin, 1999). The ‘symbolic domination’ (Bourdieu, 2001) of the mythic
vision means that the masculinity of ‘real police work’ is accepted by both
men and women as self-evident, natural as well as neutral.
The idea that female officers do not perceive this symbolic domination as
domination and thus accept its premise is not to blame the victim but to
recognize the ‘immensity of the task’ of reversing this (Le Hir, 2000: 140).
Similarly, hegemonic masculinity implies ‘consent and participation’ by the
subordinated groups (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 841). But how is
such domination achieved? Is there no way of contesting or resisting this
domination? West and Zimmerman’s (1987) ‘doing gender’ approach has
been adopted by some policing scholars (see Martin and Jurik, 1996/2006;
Doran and Chan, 2003) as a way of making visible the processes and
mechanisms through which the gendered nature of policing is accomplished.
Within this approach, gender is not regarded as an individual attribute but
‘an emergent property of social practice’; it is accomplished by people in
their interactions with others within the context of larger social structures
and institutions: ‘as individuals construct their identities, they simultane-
ously reflect, reproduce, and sometimes challenge existing social structural
arrangements’ (Martin and Jurik, 2006: 31, 50).
The aim of this article is to assess the utility of the ‘doing gender’ frame-
work for understanding gender issues in policing. It draws on data from a
longitudinal study of police recruits who were interviewed during the first
two years, and then nine to 10 years after entry, to analyse how mid-career
female and male officers engaged in doing gender and the extent to which
female officers had changed the way they constructed gender as they
became more experienced and achieved higher rank in the police organiza-
tion. The article concludes with an assessment of the doing gender frame-
work for understanding the prospects of gender equality in policing.

Doing gender: a framework for change?

West and Zimmerman’s ‘doing gender’ framework is premised on making

distinctions among three concepts: sex; sex category; and gender. Sex is
determined by ‘socially agreed upon biological criteria’; sex category is
‘established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays’
such as attire and deportment that proclaim that a person is a man or a
woman; while gender is ‘the activity of managing situated conduct in light
of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s
sex category’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987: 127). Doing gender means
‘being accountable’ to one’s membership in a sex category, that is, actions
taken are subject to comment and characterization as being appropriate or
428 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

inappropriate to being a man or a woman.3 West and Zimmerman’s frame-

work is based on Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, and especially informed by
the case study of Agnes, a transsexual whose situation made visible how
gender was accomplished—an accomplishment that is taken for granted by
the majority of women. West and Zimmerman (1987: 140, emphasis in
original) have argued, therefore, that gender is not what a person is, ‘it is
something one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with others’.
The utility of the ‘doing gender’ approach has been re-evaluated in recent
years (see Miller, 2002; Deustch, 2007; Jurik and Siemsen, 2009). The ben-
efits of the approach are summarized as follows. First, it does not rely on
socialization as the source of difference between men and women, but sug-
gests that both men and women construct gender in a dynamic, relational
and ongoing way (Miller, 2002; Vidal-Ortiz, 2009). People are not trapped
by a particular set of norms prevalent at a particular period of time
(Deustch, 2007). Second, doing gender was a ‘conceptual breakthrough’
that responded to the ‘theoretical impasse’ between the micro and the macro
in feminist theory that occurred in the mid-1980s (Messerschmidt, 2009). It
does not assume that all gender differences stem from the structural differ-
ences between men and women in terms of access to power and resources.
Such differences can be ‘mediated through social interactions that always
contain the potential for resistance’ (Deutsch, 2007: 108). Third, doing
gender provides a tool for ‘protecting’ the fundamental insight of gender
being a system of inequality and oppression from degenerating into essen-
tialism (Connell, 2009). It reveals how different masculinities and feminini-
ties are social accomplishments that depend on social context (Miller, 2002;
Deutsch, 2007). Doing gender is a different project depending on the gender,
age, occupation and so on of the person. Finally, by focusing on the con-
struction of gender, this approach makes visible how women ‘might be
inadvertently participating in [their] own silencing in interactions with men’
(Smith, 2009: 76) and provides a way of thinking about how gendered
nature of institutions can be changed—through agency and interaction
(Miller, 2002).
The approach is not without its critics. Daly (1997) has summarized early
reactions to the doing gender framework and the subsequent extension to
‘doing difference’ (West and Fenstermaker, 1995, 2002) which covers
‘class–race–gender’ as an oppressive structure. While some scholars such as
Connell, Messerschmidt, Martin and Jurik have adapted this framework in
developing their own analysis, others were sceptical or wary of the frame-
work’s lack of attention to structures of power or to the materiality of sex.
Although different theorists take issues with different aspects of the
approach (see Jurik and Siemsen, 2009), one criticism that stands out
relates to the ‘misuse’ of doing gender by researchers. Deutsch (2007: 108)
has argued that the concept has predominantly been used to demonstrate
stability rather than change in gender relations: ‘Doing gender has become
a theory of conformity and gender conventionality, albeit of multiple forms
of conventionality.’ She criticizes the definition of doing gender: she argues
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 429

that ‘to engage in behavior at the risk of gender assessment’ (West and
Zimmerman, 2002: 13) does not distinguish between actions that conform
and those that resist gendered norms. This makes it difficult to understand
how gender inequality could be changed.
Deutsch (2007) suggests that there should be a shift in both the research
agenda and the terminology. In terms of research, she suggests looking for
historical and societal ‘variations in gender inequality ... so that we can
understand the conditions under which change for the better occurs’ (2007:
113). She asks researchers to focus on how social interactions can lead to
change and whether there has been change (or a backlash) over time. She
thinks it is important to acknowledge that ‘gender, although always lurking
in the background, varies in salience across different situations’ (2007: 116).
She asks if difference always means inequality and ‘If difference can and usu-
ally does support gender oppression, must it?’ (2007: 117). In relation to
terminology, Deutsch (2007: 122) wants to use the phrase ‘undoing gender’4
to refer to ‘social interactions that reduce gender difference’. This is similar
to what Doran and Chan (2003) did in differentiating between ‘doing gender
equality’ and ‘doing gender difference’. Risman (2009: 83) also supports this
focus on ‘undoing gender’, arguing that ‘gender structure is not static’ and it
may be ‘that at the same moment people are undoing some aspects of gender
and doing others’. West and Zimmerman (2009: 117), however, disagree;
they interpret ‘undoing gender’ as ‘doing away with’ or ‘abandonment’ of
gender which ignores the fact that accountability to sex category member-
ship is at the core of the concept. This is certainly not the meaning of ‘undo-
ing gender’ that Deutsch (2007) had intended, that is, engaging in social
interactions that resist gendered norms or reduce gender difference rather
than reproduce it. Undoing gender is consistent with Connell’s (2009: 109)
observation that the ‘contestation of gender hierarchy’, which requires the
‘collective agency’ of women, ‘can change the conditions of accountability of
individual actions’. It is also consistent with the ‘weakening of accountabil-
ity’ that West and Zimmerman (1987: 146) saw possible with legislative
changes such as the Equal Rights Amendment in the USA. This renewed
interest in ‘doing gender’ provides a new challenge for research on women
in policing which we will address in the current article.

Data sources

The research organization and research methods of the original study are
discussed in detail in Chan et al. (2003: ch. 2). The New South Wales Police
Force is the oldest and largest police force in Australia, with over 14,000
sworn police officers, serving a population of seven million. The decade
between the commencement of original study and the follow-up study was
a period of major organizational change, following findings of ‘systemic’
police corruption by a Royal Commission (see Chan and Dixon, 2007). In
terms of women in policing, the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 and
430 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984 outlaw discrimination in employ-

ment on the basis of sex, pregnancy and marital status, as well as sexual
harassment. Since the mid-1980s, the NSW Police has had a policy of
increasing the proportion of female recruits (Chan, 1997). The proportion
of female sworn officers in the NSW Police has increased from less than 2
per cent in the 1970s to around 11 per cent in the early 1990s (Sutton,
1992) and 26 per cent in 2006 (Ronalds, 2006). According to a 2005 survey,
the NSW Police had in place a number of family-friendly policies such as
paid maternity leave, carer’s leave, part-time policing, flexible rostering, job
sharing, pregnancy policy and working from home (Police Federation of
Australia, 2005). In spite of these policies, a 2006 inquiry into the NSW
Police found serious incidents of sexual harassment from male officers and
evidence of sex discrimination in the form of: ‘(a) opposition to women
working part-time following maternity leave, (b) attitudes towards women
generally, [and] (c) derogatory and negative attitudes to police women creat-
ing substantial barriers to the promotion of women and access to relief
positions’ (Ronalds, 2006: 22–3).
The 1995–7 study involved the use of questionnaires, interviews,
participant observation and documentary analysis. Questionnaires were
administered (to all recruits in the selected class of 150) and interviews
conducted (with half of the class) at four points in time: during recruits’
first week at the Police Academy, then six months, 18 months and 24
months later. The follow-up study was conducted between 2004 and 2005,
using both mail-out questionnaires (Survey 5) and face-to-face interviews
(Round 5). Only 118 of the original 150 recruits were still employed by the
police in 2005; all were invited to participate in the study. A total of 42
questionnaires were returned and 44 face-to-face interviews conducted.
The response rates were 34 per cent and 36 per cent respectively. In spite
of the low response rates, the survey and interview samples are fairly simi-
lar to the population of the remaining cohort in terms of gender, rank, duty
and current location (see Chan and Doran, 2009). Female recruits made up
about one-third of the original cohort; there were very few non-Anglo
recruits in the sample (less than 10 per cent). Among the female officers
who remained in the police force, nine out of 10 had been promoted to the
level of senior constable or sergeant.5 There was also a high degree of job
satisfaction, with 100 per cent of the female respondents in Survey 5
expressing satisfaction with their career choice, compared with 76 per cent
of males.
The following analysis is based on data from semi-structured interviews
conducted with female recruits who were asked (among a dozen other
questions) whether they thought that their experience had been different
because they were female.6 This question was asked at Round 2, and repeated
at Rounds 3, 4 and 5.7 In addition, 18 male interviewees in the follow-up
study were invited to give their views on gender issues in policing.8 Where
gender issues arose spontaneously in the course of the interview, these
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 431

responses were also taken into account in the analysis. We acknowledge that
interviewees’ accounts of their experiences or views on gender issues are part
of their ‘performance’ for the researchers and their performance could be
different in front of other people. Nevertheless, these accounts are aspects of
doing gender as interviewees ‘act with the awareness that they will be judged
according to what is deemed appropriate feminine or masculine behavior’
(Deutsch, 2007: 106–7).

Doing and undoing gender in policing

Results of the study have been analysed9 in two ways: cross-sectionally

across males and females for the interviews in Round 5, and longitudinally
for female respondents over five interviews. We initially attempted to clas-
sify the responses into two mutually exclusive categories (doing gender and
undoing gender), but a third group soon emerged that we decided to label
as ‘doing and undoing gender’.10 The three groups are:

(1) Doing gender, where the respondent reinforced the notion that male and
female officers are different and therefore should be treated differently.
(2) Undoing gender, where the respondent either contested or resisted dis-
criminatory treatment because of gender.
(3) Doing and undoing gender, where the respondent spoke about women
being different but wanted female officers treated equally regardless of
difference.

Cross-sectional analysis: mid-career male and female officers

The cross-sectional results (see Table 1) show that around four out of 10
mid-career officers were primarily doing gender. Two males and five
females were mainly undoing gender in the sense of advocating gender
equality, while three males and four females were both doing and undoing
gender in that they discussed gender differences but wanted women to be
treated equally in spite of these differences.

Table 1   Responses to gender question by sex of interviewee (Round 5)

Doing &
Doing gender Undoing gender undoing gender N/A Total

Males 8 (44%) 2 (11%) 3 (17%) 5 (28%) 18

Females 6 (40%) 5 (33%) 4 (27%) 0 (0%) 15
Total 14 (42%) 6 (18%) 7 (21%) 6 (18%) 33
432 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

Doing gender
Interviewees in this group (eight males and six females) considered women
to be essentially different and should not be performing the same work as
men in policing. Male officers in this group expressed a clear view that
women are generally not suited to police work. They were concerned about
having to protect female officers in violent situations and saw them as a
burden and a distraction. While acknowledging that female officers were
generally a positive addition to the police, they thought most women ‘can’t
physically do the job’ and should not be deployed ‘in the frontline’ of polic-
ing, because policing was ‘really not a woman’s job’. Women have their
‘place’ in the organization, for example, in dealing with female victims of
crime. Female officers in this group had similar views: they were not in
favour of pairing two females in the same team because of safety reasons.
Note that there was a divergence in emphasis between the male and female
interviewees in this group: although both were concerned that females were
generally not as strong physically as males, female officers tended to con-
strue differences as forming the basis of more positive policing strategies
that take advantage of the complementarities of skills, while male officers
were more likely to construe them as the rationale for more negative strate-
gies such as the segregation of duties. At a more subtle level, both male and
female officers in this group were doing gender in relation to sexist jokes:
male officers were consciously doing gender by telling these jokes while
female officers were unconsciously doing the same by ignoring these jokes
or laughing along rather than taking offence.

Undoing gender
The five female officers in this group wanted women to be treated equally as
police officers. They did not wish to be protected by their male colleagues in
volatile situations. There was recognition that policing is nevertheless a
‘rough job’, and women have to be prepared to ‘get their hands dirty’. As they
gained experience and seniority, these female officers felt that they no longer
had to prove themselves by acting tough, nor did they need to try twice as
hard to build a reputation. There were only two male officers in this group,
both said that gender was not an issue in policing. Both male and female offic-
ers emphasized that physical strength should not be a gender issue, as men are
not necessarily stronger. For officers in this group, equality of treatment was
clearly stated in the job requirement; individual or gender-related differences
were irrelevant. As a female officer said, ‘You’re not employed as a female
police officer, you’re employed as a police officer so you should have the same
rules and same regulations, the same accountability.’

Doing and undoing gender

Interviewees in this group (three males and four females) believed that
males and females should be treated equally as police officers, but they also
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 433

thought that male and female officers bring different qualities to policing.
Even as they accepted gender differences, some female officers had to strug-
gle continually against differential treatment. A female senior constable
expressed frustration that she was not taken seriously as being capable of
handling physical confrontation; she had to tell a male officer not to call for
another back-up car just because two female officers turned up. On another
occasion she had to tell a male colleague to ‘stop this conversation right
now’ and threaten to report him because she found his remarks ‘highly
offensive’. Several female officers felt that their pregnancies and maternity
leaves had had negative impacts on their careers. Some felt a lack of support
from the police organization when they were pregnant. One senior consta-
ble said that her fellow officers’ attitudes towards her changed dramatically,
‘once I got pregnant, they didn’t think I had a brain’. For officers in this
group, females in the police were an important asset, and provided the
police with a greater range of responses to most situations. Female officers
in this group embraced gender differences and pointed to the benefit of
having both sexes in a partnership. In some ways they also challenged the
traditional doxa of policing, as they believed that good policing was not
about physicality, and that women had a lot to offer in the way they react
and deal with situations.

Longitudinal analysis of interviews with female officers

The longitudinal results (Table 2 and Figure 1) show that the numbers
(and proportions) of female interviewees doing gender appear to have
increased over time. None of the female recruits in Round 2 engaged in
doing gender: there was a general sense among those who expressed a view
that women should be treated equally. Over the next 18 months, a growing
proportion of women started to accept differential treatment. By Round 5,
the proportion of females doing gender and those in the third group (doing
and undoing gender) had increased substantially, while those undoing
gender did not change very much over the years. The overall picture that
emerged points to an increasing recognition of gender differences.

Table 2   Female responses to gender question (Rounds 2 to 5)a

R2 (6 mths) R3 (12 mths) R4 (24 mths) R5a (9–10 yrs)

Doing gender 0 (0%) 2 (13%) 3 (18%) 6 (40%)

Undoing gender   5 (25%) 5 (31%) 4 (24%) 5 (33%)
Doing and   2 (10%) 1 (6%) 1 (6%) 4 (27%)
   undoing gender
Not applicable 13 (65%) 8 (50%) 9 (53%) 0 (0%)
Total   20 16 17 15
Note that seven of the 15 interviewees in Round 5 were not interviewed in previous rounds.
a
434 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

Figure 1   Female responses to gender question (Rounds 2 to 5)

a
Note that seven of the 15 interviewees in Round 5 were not interviewed in previous rounds.

Changes within individuals can be identified by comparing earlier interviews

with the final one (see Table 3). For the eight female interviewees we were
able to track, the pattern of change was consistent with the trend shown in
Figure 1: there was a greater tendency to recognize gender differences over
time; by Round 5, only one interviewee was undoing gender. In terms of
individual changes, two female officers shifted from undoing to doing
gender (B, C), one from undoing to both doing and undoing gender (D),
one (A) from doing gender to both doing and undoing gender, one from
both doing and undoing gender to doing gender (E), while three (F, G and H)
went from ‘not applicable’ to each of the three categories. The stories of
these eight female officers provide insights into the complexity of gender
construction in policing.

General observation
When these eight women joined the police, they were in their 20s, single
(except one), having completed secondary or some tertiary education and
having worked in clerical or service jobs. Most had wanted to join the
police since an early age. Four had family members, relatives or boy-
friends who were police. While they were all aware of entering a male-
dominated occupation, gender issues did not figure prominently in the
initial interviews, even when prompted by the interviewer. This lack of
interest in gender issues was partly because of the fact that both male and
female recruits spent the first two years almost totally preoccupied with
the mission of becoming accepted as a police officer (Chan et al., 2003).
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 435

Table 3   Changes in eight Longitudinal Interviews with Female Officers over Time

Response at Round 5 interview

Undoing Doing and

Initial response Doing gender gender undoing gender Initial total

Doing gender   A* 1

Undoing gender B, C D 3
Doing and E 1
   undoing gender
N/A F G H 3
Total at Round 5 4 1 3 8
*Letters indicate individual cases.

For new recruits, doing police (constructing their identity as police officers)
almost always took precedence over doing or undoing gender, unless,
as in the case of the obstacle course, there was a perception that some
female recruits were able to gain an unfair advantage in being accepted
into the occupation through being given a less stringent test. Constructing
their identity as police officers meant that female recruits tended to down-
play gender differences in early interviews; their accounts highlighted the
commonality of experience (‘we’re in the same boat’) and camaraderie
with other recruits and police officers. As they continued their project of
becoming police officers, both male and female recruits increasingly
engaged in doing difference between police and non-police: the ‘us versus
them’ mentality was applied not only to offenders, but also to the
ungrateful public, the uncooperative victims, the ‘pathetic’ criminal justice
system and later the media and the Royal Commission which were seen
as sensationalizing police misconduct. In their ongoing creation of police
identity, recruits also constructed difference between operational police
and management who were criticized as being out of touch and not stand-
ing by the rank and file when complaints were filed against them. Some
female recruits differentiated themselves from other females who they
regarded as lazy, incompetent or wanted special treatment because of
their lack of physical fitness.
By the fifth interview, however, doing police was no longer a pressing
issue, as the female officers had already demonstrated their competence as
police officers, and almost all had been promoted to a higher rank. Four of
the eight female officers were married with one or two children, and two
were working part-time after their maternity leave. All except one11 were
more relaxed about discussing gender differences, while some had become
less concerned about differential treatment of female officers. Doing or
undoing gender among mid-career female officers did not follow any
436 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

general pattern; it seemed to be contingent on the life and work situation

of the officers. Space does not permit a detailed description of the stories of
all eight female officers. We have therefore chosen two cases12 to illustrate
how individual circumstances might have influenced the construction of
gender at different stages of their career.

Case B: Brenda—from undoing gender to doing gender

Brenda had wanted to join the police since she was 15 or 16. She saw
policing as ‘one of the most responsible jobs that you can have’. She had
very little worry about being a woman in policing: she said that the police
organization had changed ‘a lot’ and ‘it’s a little bit easier being a woman
at the moment’. Brenda had a strong sense of work ethic, discipline and
professionalism. She was very unhappy about her female classmates who
‘would play on the fact that they are female to get out of things or to get
things done’. In her view, ‘this is a job where you can’t be female or male
as an officer … it’s meant to be equal’. After a year of experiencing
operational policing while doing field training, Brenda said she still loved
her job, but was well aware of its limitations and ambiguities. Her views
of the police organization had changed dramatically: ‘it’s a shambles. …
there’s no direction anywhere’. At the time, the NSW Police was undergo-
ing a great deal of changes in the wake of the Royal Commission. Six
months later, Brenda’s views of the job had become even less positive: ‘I
thought I’d get more respect from the public.’ She felt a great change in
herself as a result of the job: ‘I’ve toughened up. I’m more cynical … I’ve
lost a lot of patience and tolerance, especially around here with drunks
and junkies.’
By the time she was interviewed in Round 5, Brenda had been promoted
to a senior constable, a position with training and supervisory responsibili-
ties. She was married with two children and was stationed at a working
class metropolitan area. She readily admitted that her own views on women
in policing had changed over the years:
at first being silly and young, I thought we’re all the same, I can do the same
job any other bloke can do, you know, but after a while you realize and like
even now I think I’d prefer not to be rostered on with two girls … and I let
the supervisors know … ’cause men are stronger … We have a lot of [Pacific]
Islanders around here, and they’re big people … and I’ve had trouble trying to
restrain like big boys, big Islanders, you can’t even get the handcuffs on them.
Brenda’s reluctance to work with female officers was also driven by her
belief that a lot of female officers in her station were incompetent:
I actually found it to be embarrassing to be female in a place like this …
there’s not many females here but the ones that are here are hopeless …
incompetent and lazy … they’re all, you know, glammed up and makeupy
and all the rest of it, and … they expect the guys to do all the work for them
if they, sort of, you know, flutter their eyelids at them.
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 437

She did not have any problem with male officers becoming protective of
female officers; she saw it as one officer supporting another when help was
needed. Nor did she mind any of the sexist jokes told by male officers:
The guys here are quite good, they know some things like an offensive, really
grotty joke they won’t tell it in front of women. None of them use the c-word
in front of the girls, like, they’re quite good like that.
Part of her consciousness about safety was related to her being a mother.
She found that since she’d had children she became a lot more cautious in
her work:
I don’t think there’s much between bravery and stupidity … but now that I
have children, I look at things differently now, and I think, well, I’m not
going to run into [life threatening situations] … before I never really have
any fear.
She believed that female officers had an advantage in certain situations, she
saw it as a fundamental difference between men and women, not between
a male and female police officer: where women would try to handle volatile
situations quietly and sensibly, ‘most guys want to go in there and … get
the testosterone going and get it all sorted out’.
At the fifth interview Brenda revealed for the first time that she was from
an Indigenous background, although this was not a visible fact and so ‘only
a few people know around here’. She said that she did not ‘choose to keep
it quiet; it’s just that no one’s ever really asked me’, but she admitted that
she did not ‘tell too many people … it doesn’t get you very far in this job’.
Quite early on in her career, she was really shocked by the racist jokes and
rudeness of some of the officers towards people who did not speak English.
She thought that the Aboriginal jokes she heard from police were more
offensive than the female jokes, because ‘they’re talking about things that
basically they know nothing about’. It was clear that Brenda’s Aboriginality
was a difficult issue for her to deal with as a police officer, especially when
she was dispatched to the site of one of the urban riots: she said she felt
‘ashamed’ and ‘disgraced’ by the ‘disgusting behaviour’ of some of the
Aboriginal people she encountered.

Case E: Elizabeth—from doing and undoing gender to doing gender

Elizabeth decided to give up her university studies and joined the police
when she was 20. She was attracted to policing because of its variety,
physicality and the opportunity to work with people. She felt she herself
was not given any differential treatment as a female at the Academy, but
was critical of other female recruits who ‘got through’ even though they did
not meet the criteria: she thought that ‘it jeopardizes the opinion that others
have of other female officers’. In her view female recruits were doing well
academically but not physically. After her field training Elizabeth said that
she was no longer as enthusiastic about policing: she had expected police
to be much more appreciated by members of the public and other police
438 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

instead of constantly being criticized. She told us that she had become more
‘worldly’ and ‘a lot more cynical’. While she had ambition to go up the
ranks, Elizabeth was getting married and planned to have a family. She did
not believe female officers should do general duties work once they had
children because it involved shift work and was dangerous and stressful.
By the fifth interview Elizabeth had been promoted to sergeant; she was
married (to a police officer), had one child and was pregnant with her sec-
ond. She was happy working part time, which she wanted to do until her
children were in school. She felt that since her maternity leave and part-time
work, her role within the Command had ‘really diminished’. Nevertheless,
she felt that she had achieved a ‘nice balance’ between work and home life.
She thought that the police organization was supportive of mothers:
I think they’re—they’ve been very accommodating to me and the majority of
other mothers here. The maternity leave entitlements are good and I think
we’re fortunate. I think the only disappointing thing really is that your career
is on hold whilst you continue to work part time and have a family but that
to me is the offset of having, you know, time at home. If I wanted to pursue
a career, I would have to come back full time.
Elizabeth thought that her male colleagues had been quite protective and
especially responsive and sensitive to her being pregnant in the job, which
she found ‘quite surprising and in a really nice way’. She did not find the
male officers’ treatment patronizing or chauvinistic, instead she thought it
was ‘gentlemanly’. She felt as if she had got ‘a hundred brothers looking
over [her] shoulder’. While there were ‘men’s clubs’ within the police, both
men and women could be excluded socially from these ‘cliques’ if they did
not ‘go drinking and punting after work’. In her view women’s inclusion
and exclusion are complex issues:
I think the old view of oh, the female’s been left out from the males—that’s
a bit too simplistic now. I think now there are, you know, it can [be] the
lesbians, it can be the gay men, it can be minority groups, it could be, you
know, for example Moslem groups within different genders, those sorts of
things—far more complex.
While Elizabeth was of the view that ‘you can be soft and be feminine
and can still be a good police officer’, she thought ‘there are physical differ-
ences obviously’ between males and females, and was of the opinion that
‘two women shouldn’t work the truck’: the public would be better served
by having one of each, since ‘male and females seem to complement each
other more … We think differently, we act differently.’

Equality versus difference

This article has focused on a specific cohort of mid-career police officers,

but the findings are consistent with the broader trends of gender regimes in
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 439

the NSW public sector: while equal opportunity and equality of treatment
had become official policy, among both male and female workers there
remains a widespread belief in ‘fundamental gender differences’—in physi-
cal capacities, character traits, interests, skills and so on (Connell, 2006). In
spite of the small number of interviews, this study offers rare insights into
how mid-career police officers engaged in doing and undoing gender. The
emergence of a third group that did not see difference and equality as mutu-
ally exclusive points to the fundamental question of whether ‘difference
always mean[s] inequality’ (Deutsch, 2007: 117). This reflects a broader
‘dilemma’ among feminist scholars and activists. As Le Hir (2000: 126)
points out, there has been a divide between ‘feminism of equality’ and
‘feminism of difference’ within women’s movements for nearly two centu-
ries (see also the debate sparked by Felski, 1997). While feminists of equal-
ity see gender as a social construction and the endorsement of difference a
risky path that leads to essentialism, feminists of difference argue that in
order to change the masculinity of their work environment, women should
‘identify, emphasize, and valorize these differences so as to better eliminate
biases against women’ (Le Hir, 2000: 126). This echoes Scott’s (1988: 38)
analysis of the ‘conflicting feminist positions and political strategies’ in the
1980s between those who argue that sexual difference should be irrelevant
for accessing education, employment and other social institutions and those
who insist that women’s difference ought to be accepted and their needs
taken into account. Scott (1988: 44) has argued that:
Equality-versus-difference cannot structure choices for feminist politics; the
oppositional pairing misrepresents the relationship of both terms … The
political notion of equality thus includes, indeed depends on, an acknowl-
edgment of the existence of difference. Demands for equality have rested on
implicit and usually unrecognized arguments from difference; if individuals
or groups were identical or the same there would be no need to ask for
equality. Equality might well be defined as deliberate indifference to specified
differences.
In the case of policing, then, the issue is not whether female officers are
different—because the opposite of ‘different’ is ‘identical’—but that female
officers should be treated as equal to male officers in their employment
condition, career opportunity, and so on. Officers who engaged in what we
labelled as ‘doing and undoing gender’ were cognizant of the fact that
equality-versus-difference was a false dichotomy. Women may or may not
be physically strong, they may or may not bring a special touch to policing
by being able to defuse volatile situation without using force, they may or
may not get pregnant and take maternity leave, but they must not be dis-
criminated against on the basis of some assumed categorical difference
because of their sex.
Our longitudinal data showed that most female officers had changed
their gender practice over the years. The shifts demonstrate that gender is
not a fixed quality: it is constantly negotiated and re-negotiated through
440 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

social interactions. The two case studies show how the shift to doing gender
can be structurally as well as situationally contingent. Brenda and Elizabeth
both spent their first two years doing police, establishing their credentials
by passing exams, building networks, accumulating knowledge and exper-
tise, and negotiating the changing field of policing. They were downplaying
gender differences and wanted to work in a level playing field. By the fifth
interview both were doing gender, partly because doing police was no
longer the most important project—for both because they had already dem-
onstrated their competency and been promoted to a higher rank, and for
Elizabeth in particular because she was putting her career on hold while
giving priority to caring for her children. Ironically, at this stage of their
career when they had accumulated the necessary symbolic, cultural and
social capital to be regarded as equal to male officers, neither was undoing
gender. Both officers had emphasized physical differences and the comple-
mentarity of skills between males and females, both were in favour of not
rostering two females in one truck, and both accepted male protectiveness
as a positive part of the work.
One obvious factor that had influenced this change was their parenting
responsibilities. Brenda openly admitted that she had become more cau-
tious and safety conscious since the birth of her children, while Elizabeth
was grateful for the support the organization and other officers had shown
towards female officers who took maternity leave and worked part time.
Having children appears to be an important factor that affected the way
gender was constructed by these mid-career female officers: among the five
who were undoing gender, only one had children, the rest were either single
or did not have any children, while among the six who were doing gender,
all but one had children.13
Brenda’s and Elizabeth’s accounts illustrate the complexity of gender
issues in policing. Brenda, for example, had to manage her hidden
Aboriginal identity in addition to her gender and police identity. In effect,
Brenda was doing gender at the same time as doing race difference, but it
was not until the fifth interview that she identified herself to the researcher
as part-Aboriginal. By not openly revealing this identity, she evaded the
accountability that such categorization entailed, because in her view an
Aboriginal identity ‘doesn’t get you very far in this job’ (see West and
Fenstermaker, 2002). Both Brenda and Elizabeth had to negotiate their
parenting responsibilities in relation to police work. While other dimen-
sions of work and personal identities might have impacted on the construc-
tion of gender—for example, one female officer had a same-sex partner,
another had had an alcohol problem, and others had multiple issues—these
were rarely discussed by interviewees as issues underlying their doing or
undoing of gender. As Connell (2006: 845) has pointed out, gender equity
policy debates are often premised on a ‘simplified, categorical view of
gender’, while this may be effective as a political strategy, it is ultimately a
limited way of seeing because it ignores the complexities of gender identities
and practices.
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 441

Conclusion

In this concluding section, we return to the aim of this article, which is to

assess the utility of the doing gender framework in light of this analysis. To
make a judgement about the usefulness of the framework, we draw on
Scott’s (1988: 33) discussion about the kind of theory ‘feminism needs’:
theory that can analyse the ‘workings of patriarchy’ in ideology, institution,
organization, subjectivity and so on; theory that can account for continuities
as well as change; theory that considers diversities rather than universals;
and theory that is useful for political practice. It is clear from the original
formulation of doing gender that it is indeed capable of analysing how gen-
der is accomplished through interactions in a variety of settings and mani-
festations. The framework has also been successfully adapted to account for
differences in terms of race and class, and their interaction with gender, so
that doing gender is not a theory about unity but about diversity. The way
doing gender has been applied in research has been less useful for political
practice because it has primarily been used to demonstrate stability rather
than change (Deutsch, 2007). Once we open up the framework to highlight
contestations and challenges to gender hierarchy as suggested by the notion
of undoing gender, the framework reveals its capacity to explain change and
inform political practice. Our research reaffirms the benefits of this
approach. Not only does it make transparent the agency of male and female
actors in sustaining or resisting the status quo, it fills in where structural
analysis fails to reach—the interstices where organizational policies such as
equal employment opportunity have decoupled from everyday practices. As
Silvestri (2003: 172) warns, there is a need to be vigilant as policy is not
easily translated into practice, and the discrimination faced by modern
female officers is ‘less blatant, less visible, and as a result, more insidious’.
How can this way of theorizing and researching gender issues in policing
inform political practice? Our research results suggest that the status quo of
gender inequality is difficult to change: 40 years after women had gained
full status as members of the NSW Police, a substantial proportion of mid-
career male officers continued to see policing as a man’s job and chose to
emphasize the physical demand of potentially violent frontline policing as
the norm that women should be measured against. A similar proportion of
female officers supported this position, seeing that women have a ‘place’ in
policing but not in the frontline or in violent situations. The longitudinal
analysis also confirms a trend towards doing rather than undoing gender as
female officers gained experience and rank. The key to understanding how
resistance is possible lies in analysing the situated actions of officers. Our
research lays bare some of the situations where the false dichotomy of dif-
ference versus equality were constructed—situations where the assumed
importance of physicality of police work had justified male protectiveness
and female acceptance of differential treatment, where the supposedly supe-
rior ‘people skills’ of female officers had excused the segregation of duties,
and where sexist jokes were to be tolerated in order to be treated as equal.
442 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

The case studies show how doing gender was bound up with the particular
situations female officers found themselves in: initially as new recruits they
were more concerned with doing police than doing gender, but once their
police identity seemed secure, those who took on parenting responsibilities
began to accept a form of gendered division of labour. Examining individ-
ual cases reveals that gender is only one of several dimensions along which
female officers negotiate their (multiple) identities.
As Miller (2002: 452) points out, women’s ‘situated actions can be exam-
ined as gender strategies for navigating within male-dominated terrains’
(see also Messerschmidt, 2002 on the fluctuation of gender constructions
from difference to similarity). In policing, gender can be a resource as well
as a constraint for female officers. By drawing on gender stereotypes, some
female officers are able to gain advantage in securing a safe position in
policing where male protectiveness and gendered division of labour are
accepted as normal and preferable. But situations can change: as police
officers become more experienced, get deployed in duties other than ‘front-
line’ policing, and rise to leadership positions, the use of physicality as a
reason for the exclusion of female officers becomes less tenable, yet, as
Silvestri (2007: 53) discovered, senior female officers are confronted with a
different kind of masculinity ‘where physicality is less obvious, but where
traits associated with “managerial masculinity” dominate’. It is important
to remember that doing and undoing of gender takes place within the field
of policing which has been changing as a result of globalization of markets,
advances in technology, the commercialization of security and the emer-
gence of different models of policing and regulation (Chan et al., 2003).
Increased recruitment of females is one of the current trends that is likely to
continue, as is the provision of family-friendly employment policies. The
doing gender framework neither supports pessimism nor condones compla-
cency: doing and undoing is ongoing, interactional, as well as institutional.

Notes

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery

Project Grant (DP0344753). We would like to thank the NSW Police Force
for permission to conduct the research and the police officers for taking
part in the project. Special thanks are due to Raewyn Connell, Ros Diprose,
three anonymous reviewers, Mary Bosworth and Jasmine Bruce for their
comments on earlier versions of the article.
  1. The percentage of female officers in all Australian police forces went from
14 per cent in 1996 to 23 per cent in 2006 (Irving, 2009). In England and
Wales, this percentage rose from 16 per cent in 1998 to 23 per cent in 2007
(Ford, 2008, quoted in Irving, 2009). US figures show a much more modest
increase, from 9 per cent in 1990 to 13 per cent in 2001 among agencies with
over 100 sworn officers (National Center for Women & Policing, 2001).
 Chan et al.—Doing and undoing gender in policing 443

  2. Hegemonic masculinity refers to ‘the pattern of practice … that allowed

men’s dominance over women to continue’; hegemony is not achieved by
violence, rather ‘through culture, institutions and persuasion’ (Connell and
Messerschmidt, 2005: 832). Hegemonic masculinity assumes the existence
of a hierarchy of masculinities, including subordinated masculinities of
men who did not live up to the dominant macho image and complicit mas-
culinity of men and women who complied with this hierarchy.
  3. The dichotomy of male/female in the categorization of sex, sex category
and gender can be subject to challenge: the most celebrated recent cases
include the 2009 controversy over the sex of the South African Olympic
athlete Caster Semenya and the choice of an Australian in 2010 to have a
change of name certificate that indicates ‘sex: not specified’, later changed
to ‘sex: not stated’ by the Government (Gibson, 2010a, 2010b).
  4. The term ‘undoing gender’ was first coined by Butler (2004: 1) who used
it in relation to the undoing of ‘restrictively normative conceptions of sex-
ual and gendered life’. Deutsch (2007: 123, n. 1) uses the term in a more
explicit way; she was in fact not aware of Butler’s usage until her article
was reviewed.
  5. This is consistent with the national trend (Irving, 2009) which shows that
the proportion of female sergeants/senior sergeants had increased from 4
per cent to 11 per cent between 1991 and 2006, while the proportion of
female commissioned officers had increased from 2 per cent to 8 per cent.
Although gender differences in rank are still stark—84 per cent of the high-
est ranking officers were male—female officers appeared to have been
promoted to the rank of inspector at a faster rate: on average 13 years for
women, compared with 15 years for men.
  6. The question was posed in terms of equality of treatment, rather than dif-
ference between male and female police, yet difference was precisely what
a number of women brought up without prompting. In contrast, Rabe-
Hemp (2009) specifically solicited female officers’ perception of their dis-
tinctiveness compared with males; very few of her interviewees resisted the
idea that female officers brought unique skills to policing.
  7. The question was posed slightly differently in Round 5: ‘What has it been
like to be a female working in policing?’—interviewees were given the
opportunity to answer generally and then asked to explore whether they
believed there was differential treatment in terms of task allocation, protec-
tiveness and so on.
  8. Only 18 of the 29 male interviewees were asked the gender question—an
idea suggested by Doran after completing a number of interviews.
  9. Given the small number of interviews and the self-selected nature of the
sample, these results are indicative of the response patterns in this cohort
rather than more general trends.
10. All three authors classified the interviews independently; inter-coder
differences were resolved through discussion and clarification of the
meaning of the categories. It is acknowledged that some interviews were
not straightforward to classify, and there was always the possibility that
444 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)

some of the male interviewees were cautious in their answers because

they did not wish to sound sexist in front of a female interviewer. Five
interviews with male officers were classified as ‘not applicable’ as
the respondent did not express any clear views on gender equality or
difference.
11. The only officer who was undoing gender at the fifth interview was the one
who did not get promoted to a senior rank.
12. Pseudonyms were used and some details were changed to protect the identity
of the officer.
13. Among the four female officers in the ‘doing and undoing gender’ group,
two had children and two did not.

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JANET CHAN is a professor, SALLY DORAN a former research officer and

CHRISTINA MAREL a research assistant at the University of New South Wales.
Chan has published widely on criminal justice and policing issues, including
Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing (with Devery and Doran) and Changing
Police Culture.

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