Doing and Undoing Gender in Policing: Theoretical Criminology November 2010
Doing and Undoing Gender in Policing: Theoretical Criminology November 2010
Doing and Undoing Gender in Policing: Theoretical Criminology November 2010
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What is This?
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
425
426 Theoretical Criminology 14(4)
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.
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)
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).
(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.
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.
Doing &
Doing gender Undoing gender undoing gender N/A Total
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.’
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.’
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
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
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