DOING GENDER, DOING POLICE WORK:

AN EXAMINATION OF THE BARRIERS TO THE

INTEGRATION OF WOMEN OFFICERS

Susan E. Martin

Paper presented at the Australian Institute of Criminology Conference

First Australasian Women Police Conference

Sydney, 29, 30 & 31 July 1996

For most of this century women in policing were selected according to separate criteria from
men, employed as policewomen, and limited to working with women, children, and typewriters
(Milton 1972). in the United States, it was only in 1972 that women officers won the right to (if
not the actuality of) an equal opportunity in a policing career. In the past two decades in the
U.S. many of the more than 17,000 police agencies have eliminated blatantly discriminatory
personnel practices and the representation of women has grown to about 10 percent of sworn
personnel (U.S. Department of Justice 1995). Despite this opening of the station house to a
growing number of women officers, they still face a variety of barriers to full occupational
integration. Many of these obstacles, like those faced by women in other occupations
dominated by men, are part of larger organizational and social patterns of gender differentiation
that result in exclusion from informal work cultures; resistance to women's presence expressed
at the interactional level; gender-stereotyped jobs and tasks; a sexualized workplace where
sexual harassment is all too common; and ostensibly gender-neutral organizational policies that
in fact work to women's disadvantage. At the same time, women police also encounter
resistance that may be associated with the unique aspects of their work - namely the social
control functions of policing which, as Frances Heidensohn (1992:99) has argued, is a
"profoundly gender-linked concept".

This paper/talk examines: (1) the pervasiveness of gender in all aspects of social life and, how
and why this hinders women's efforts to achieve their full potential in policing and (2) the
implications of this understanding for addressing several specific policy issues related to
women police. Much of what I will say will not be "news" to conference participants. Rather,
my goal is to put your everyday experiences and frustrations into a framework to advance your
understanding of what you may perceive as an individual problem. It is not, and I will try to
explain the large obstacles and smaller slights you experience in a conceptual framework so
that through the rest of the conference and back in your departments you are able to better
address them. 'Me material is drawn from my recent book (co-authored with Nancy Jurik),
Doing Justice, Doing Gender: Women Working in Law and C Justice Occupations (Martin and
Jurik 1996).

Terminology and Conceptual Framework

Let me begin by explaining what I mean by doing gender, how it occurs in the workplace, and
why it is important. Jobs are not gender-neutral, "empty positions" waiting to be filled by the
"best qualified" candidate (Acker 1990). Work organizations operate according to ideologies,
customs, and practices that produce and reproduce gender inequality. Occupations,
organizational hierarchies, supervisory practices, procedures for hiring and advancement, work
groups, and work activities, all are infused with gendered practices, images, and consequences.

The term gender refers not simply to a fixed attribute determined by biology or cultural
processes. Nor is it simply what one "is". Rather, it is something one enacts or "does" on an
ongoing basis by presenting oneself as masculine or feminine in routine daily interactions
through language, dress, and demeanour (Acker 1990; West and Zimmerman 1987). In short,
gender is socially constructed through interaction.
Viewing gender as socially constructed rather than as a characteristic of individuals has several
implications. It suggests that gender arises through interactional and organizational practices
and that it is a pervasive organizing and differentiating feature of all social life, woven into all
aspects of life both in and outside of the workplace. Illustrative of the extent to which cultural
and organizational practices gender occupations, or endow them with masculine or feminine
characteristics and associations, is the way that the gender of the worker and the name of the
job have become compounded and confounded in the term policeman. Indeed when my son -
then four years old - first saw a woman officer directing traffic he exclaimed, look, Mommy, a
policeman lady.

Because the norms and expectations of appropriate behaviour for police are associated with
enacting masculine behaviour, women entering this occupation encounter dilemmas. On the
one hand, as police, they are expected to display masculine behaviour in interacting with fellow
workers as peers; on the other hand, as women, they are expected and pressured to display
feminine behaviour including deference to men which is deemed inappropriate for an officer
(Goffman, 1956). Thus, in doing gender on the job women police continuously must decide
when and how to act like a cop and when to act like a lady.

Barriers to Integration for Women in Policing

Looking at the barriers to women in policing from this social construction of gender
perspective, I will discuss, respectively, how they emanate from the gendered work culture of
the occupation; the gendered interactions, ideologies, and images that women encounter in
police work; how the work organizations policies are gendered in favour of men; and the
effects of gender on officer-citizen interactions. Each of these aspects of the gendered police
organization and occupation affects women officers and the ways they do their work and
pursue their careers.

Police Work, the Police Culture, and Men's Opposition to Women Officers

Police work involves both crime fighting, viewed by many as real police work, and service and
order maintenance tasks, disdained as far less glamorous and rewarding. The unique
combination of enormous discretionary decision-making authority, the potential for violence
across the wide variety of policing tasks, and the authority to use coercive means have led to a
unique set of attitudes and behaviours characteristics of the police and their work culture. The
presence of danger and the potential for violence lead to a generalized suspiciousness, isolation
from the community, and a cohesive, informal occupational group with its own stratification
system and norms. These, in turn, heighten the barriers to informal acceptance of anyone who
is perceived as an outsider and, therefore, cannot be counted on to conform to group norms.

Few occupations have been so fully defined as "masculine" or resistant to integration of women
as vigorously as policing. Despite changes in both the nature of policing and the status of
women, many men officers continue to believe that women cannot handle the job physically or
emotionally and, therefore, oppose their presence on patrol, as has been amply documented
(Bloch and Anderson, 1974; California Highway Patrol, 1976; Martin, 1980; Charles, 1981;
Hunt, 1990; Young 1991). Beyond the negative attitudes of individual men, is a work culture
that is characterized by drinking, crude jokes, and sexism, and which demands that women who
enter it "subsume 'male characteristics' to achieve even a limited social acceptability" (Young
1991:193).

The Logic of Sexism in Policing

As Jennifer Hunt (1984:294) observed, "the policeman's world constitutes a symbolic universe
permeated with gender meanings" that explain much of their behaviour. "The logic of sexism" rests on
their dualistic world view that associates gender stereotyped oppositions (i.e., masculinity/femininity)
with various organizational symbols (e.g., street/station house), occupational themes and work
activities (e.g., crime fighting/service and order maintenance), and situational meanings
(public/domestic; dirty/clean). In each of the gender-stereotyped opposites, the item associated with
the feminine is undervalued (Hunt 1990).

Based on this dualistic view, men create an idealized image of policing as action-oriented,
violent, and uncertain. They define themselves through these images which are closely
associated with the "masculine" side of contrasting pairs of gender- linked symbols, then use
their work as a resource for doing masculinity. Thus, officers associate "real police work" with
crime fighting which takes place on the street, and which celebrates physical prowess,
involvement in fights, and evasion of the formal rules characteristic of "street cop culture" (see
Reuss-lanni 1983). In contrast, supervisory, station house, and police academy assignments are
associated with "feminine labor" involving "inside work" and women's skills which are
associated with the "management cop" culture disdained and resisted by "street cops" (Hunt
1990).

Threat to the Work Culture and Public Image

While men's most vocal concerns about women as police usually are stated in terms of physical
capabilities, the scope of opposition to women colleagues is far broader and related to the
nature of the work, the occupational culture, and the manner in which these are used as
resources for doing gender. Men generally explain their opposition to women in terms of the
physical differences between themselves and women, who tend to be smaller and weaker. But
beyond fears that women provide less muscle is the fact in one of the few remaining
occupations in which strength and physical ability occasionally are useful, women's presence
implies either that the men's unique asset physical superiority - is irrelevant, or that a man who
works with a woman will be at a disadvantage in a confrontation. Moreover, the possibility
that women officers reduce the likelihood of a physical confrontation or act appropriately by
protecting their male partner is no comfort because it undermines the gender stereotypes that
permeate the male officers perceptual world. Women are not supposed to fight or to control
other male citizens. At the same time, for a male officer being defended by a woman is
regarded as an affront to his manhood.

Two other less frequently articulated concerns also support men's resistance to women: the
belief that women are "mentally weaker", and, therefore, unreliable in the face of danger, and
the view that women are unable to command public respect as officers. Many men assert that
they patrol in a more cautious (and, in their view, less effective) way with a female partner.

Threat to Group Solidarity and Self-identity

Women also threaten work-group solidarity. They raise the spectre of possible sexual intimacy
between partners, fostering competition among the men and thus creating a competing set of loyalties.
They also threaten the public image of police work and the mask of emotional detachment worn by
male officers by exposing the fact that the day-to-day reality of policing does not revolve around crime
fighting, but involves emotional labor and requires interpersonal skills. In addition, they inhibit men's
use of crude language, their illicit on-the-job sexual activities, and the fringe benefit of enhanced
masculinity that these confer.

Men's opposition to women in policing also reflects a deeper concern about who has a right to
manage law and order (Heidensohn 1992:215). In fact, according to Heidensohn, the view that
men own order and have sole rights to preserve it is the real but unstated issue underlying their
assertions that women are unsuitable officers and will destroy men's solidarity.

In sum, the men's opposition to women in their ranks stems from their perceived threat to the
definitions of the work, occupational culture, social status, and self-image as "men's men" and
from men's effort to maintain their near-monopoly on social control in society.

Barriers to Women Officers: Interaction, Ideology and Images

Women officers also encounter interactional barriers and gendered images that marginalize and
exclude them. They are treated as outsiders, sexual objects, targets of men's resentment, and
competitors who threaten to change the rules of officer interaction. Women's social isolation
deprives them of mobility opportunities by limiting information, mentors, informal training,
and a sense of comfort on the job. Women also face conflicting expectations and double
standards regarding their performance.

The blatant, malicious, organized, and sometimes life-threatening resistance encountered by the
first cohort of American women on patrol has diminished (Bloch and Anderson 1974; Martin
1980; Hunt 1984). Nevertheless, discrimination and hostility continue to permeate police
organizations.

Interactional Dilemmas

Because women comprise only a small proportion of officers, they suffer the consequences of
tokenism (Kanter 1977). They are highly visible as tokens which leads to performance
pressures that leave little margin for error. At the same time, women are treated
paternalistically: expected to do less than the men, extravagantly praised for doing an average
job, denied opportunities to take initiative and/or criticized for doing so (i.e., acting "like a
man"). They are also pressured to conform to gendered stereotypes as "mother", "little sister",
or "seductress" which limits their behavioural flexibility. The errors of an individual woman
are exaggerated and generalized to all women as a class, and dominants polarize differences
between themselves and tokens and heighten boundaries against them. Conversely, positive
efforts to organize a women's association or advance an individual woman, regardless of her
accomplishments. raises concerns about women getting "favoured treatment".

Double standards also persist regarding language, sexuality, appearance, and demeanour.
Women face the "language dilemmas" in deciding whether to curse, whether to tolerate men's
use of gross language, and how to deal with being called "hon" or "sweetheart" by colleagues.
Women supervisors also must deal with refusal of male subordinates to acknowledge their
rank. In fact, Morash and Haarr (1995) found that language harassment (defined as offensive
use of profanity) was a significant source of stress for women police. Describing the work
environment and double standards that women encounter, one woman sergeant stated (Martin
1990:153):

There’s a certain finesse a woman has to have, a certain feminine grace. If you tell
it like it is and don't watch your figure or fix yourself up or have what the men
expect, you won't be given quite the preference. For example, they let a capable
woman go from (a detective assignment) because she's fat yet they'll give breaks to
biggest male toad with a foul mouth.

Off-duty socializing also poses interactional dilemmas for female officers. The men often
drink together after work, participate in team sports or other shared recreational activities.
Women's limited participation in this informal socializing deprives them of an important source
of information and feedback, and the opportunity to make contacts, cultivate sponsors, and
build alliances that contribute to occupational success (Martin 1980). Although the "stag party"
atmosphere of off-duty partying has diminished in the U.S. women are only partially integrated
into the informal activities and influence structure. Some women choose not to socialize
outside of work but this social withdrawal is isolating. Other women participate in social
activities, but at the risk of sexual rumour and innuendo.

The Sexualized Workplace

Men maintain women's status as "outsiders" by sexualizing the workplace (Swerdlow 1989;
Cockburn 1991). In the stationhouse, women are subjected to sexual propositions and threats
and to sexual harassment as a condition of work including unwanted touching, comments that
call attention to their sexuality or express anti-woman sentiment. They also face a lot of pranks
and jokes such as placement of sex magazines and vibrators in their lockers (Martin 1980; Hunt
1984-, Young 1991).

How pervasive is sexual harassment on the job? One study found that 63 percent of 72 women
officers interviewed in five large urban departments recounted instances of sexual harassment
on the job, including 25 percent who had experienced quid pro quo harassment (Martin 1990).
According to another study of 26 urban and rural departments, 12 percent of the women
officers said they had been touched by supervisors in an offensive way in the past year; 4
percent said their bosses had tried to force them to have intercourse (cited in Cooper 1992:A-
10).
Regardless of how they react such harassment is problematic for women. It is an important
source of stress (Wexler and Logan 1983; Morash and Haarr 1995), isolates women from men
colleagues, and divides women. Although many women officers experience sexual
harassment, they have not united or taken coordinated action to press for change. Instead,
women tend to reproach other women, asserting that those who get sexually harassed "ask for
it" through their demeanour or behaviour.

Gendered Organizational Logic: Policies and Practices That Disadvantage Women

Departmental policies and informal practices also gender police work in ways that disadvantage
women officers. These processes begin with recruitment and selection, are reinforced through
training and assignments, and are reflected in standards for evaluating performance.

Training

At the g academy for new recruits, the curriculum, instruction, and general experience are
gendered in a number of ways. The curriculum emphasizes the development of physical and
technical skills in which men are likely to have an initial advantage over interpersonal skills at
which women are more likely to excel. For example, the men are more likely than the women
to have had previous experience with contact sports that introduced them to important elements
in the police culture including controlled use of violence, teamwork and group loyalty, uniform
behaviour, tolerance of physical pain, and a willingness to inflict pain on others (Gray 1975).

Many departments have substituted health and fitness tests for physical agility tests, which
emphasized push ups and pull ups not directly relevant to the job. But these changes are far
from uniform and all-around wellness standards have stimulated officer resistance because
passing scores are not identical for everyone.

Instructional methods and content also exemplify the gendered nature of the academy and
police organization. Classroom characterizations of women highlight their difference from
men and their inappropriateness for patrol through humor and stereotyped images (Pike 1992).
Women often appear as sex objects in jokes and training films; recruits are told that women
victims and suspects pose unique problems for officers related to women's sexiness (Pike
1992). And, although all recruits get teased as a rite of initiation, women's teasing highlights
the fact that they are regarded as sex objects (Pike 1992).

Academy training also may foster inequality by permitting or encouraging women to seek exemptions,
particularly to physical standards. By passing such women on, the instructors allow them to be
identified as different from officers who learn to "suffer in silence". This increases men's concern
about women's ability to carry out patrol duties and divides women into those who seek exemptions
and those who play by the rules (Martin 1980).

When rookies initially go on patrol, both overprotection or underinstruction retard their development of
patrol skills. Gender-based differences in interaction compounded by gendered patterns of academy
socialization and expectations of women's poor patrol performance influence rookies responses,
creating self-fulfilling prophecies for many women officers. They are not expected to behave like men
on patrol, told to stay back, and deprived of opportunities to prove themselves, then regarded as
incompetent and unmotivated officers (Martin, 1980). 'nose that reject men's overprotection and take
initiative are labeled bitches. The paternalistic cycle leads to pressure on women to leave street patrol
and denies them of opportunities to become effective patrol officers. It divides the women into those
who seek protection and those who reject it and are critical of the protected women. It contributes to
men's resentment of women whom they blame for playing by different rules which, in fact, are created
by male supervisors and supported by their own behaviour. Both the pushes of the cycle of protection
and the pulls of opportunities opened by equal employment opportunity policies have steadily
channelled women out of patrol and into more feminine assignments.

Assignments

The limited data on assignments suggest that American women patrol officers are slower to obtain
permanent patrol assignments, work more often in the station, and transfer into different specialty
assignments than men with similar seniority (Martin 1990). Both formal rules and informal practices
hinder women's careers in policing by pressing them into certain less desirable assignments, assigning
them more routine cases while high profile investigations are reserved for men, and expecting them to
perform in ways that conform to popular cultural images of femininity.

There are several reasons that women officers are overrepresented in staff assignments and
underrepresented in patrol support positions. In elite tactical units such as swat teams, the work
involves handling heavy equipment (e.g., battering rains), there is fierce competition for
assignments, and the few women who attain them often feel isolated and transfer out (Martin
1990; Price et al. 1992). In contrast, prevailing images of women assume that they have office
skills and that "inside" work is not real policing. Women are both pushed out of patrol and
pulled into assignments viewed as gender-appropriate with the additional incentives that they
provide a more comfortable work environment and offer fixed daytime hours attractive to many
of the women with primary child care responsibilities.

Performance Evaluations

Performance evaluations often are a mechanism for preserving gender power structures. Vague criteria
for measuring "good" police work permit evaluations to reflect seniority and the informal status system
of the agency, to include gender-biased categories for evaluation, and to rest on the gendered subjective
judgments of supervisors most of whom are men. Nevertheless, these ratings have profound effects on
an officer's career. In many departments, the supervisor's evaluation is an important component in the
promotion process. Even when such ratings are excluded from promotion processes, they may
influence transfer decisions and the officer's occupational self-image. This is so because, as Charles
(1981:222) observed. women are evaluated by peers "not only on job performance, but their ability to
'fit in' the social setting as well". Since the officer's ability to fit in is at least as important as job
performance in the police culture, lack of acceptance into the social culture of the work group "creates
almost insurmountable obstacles for the officer", which further hinder performance and substantiate
fellow peers' negative perceptions.

Both the officer performance rating systems and their outcomes are gendered in several ways.
Some evaluation forms use sexist language (i.e., the masculine pronoun to define traits and
characteristics). Evaluation criteria such as "personal relations" and "quantity of work" that
appear to be gender neutral in fact may be based on performance standards for men. For
example, instructions for the Chicago Police Department's rating forms suggest that in rating
"personal relations", supervisors should consider the employee's ability to cooperate in team
efforts and whether the employee is "someone with whom most other members are able to
work comfortably" (Martin 1990). Under this system, if men are not comfortable working with
a woman or overprotect her, it is she who is negatively evaluated for "inadequate" personal
relations.

Examinations of actual performance scores suggest the effects of gender stereotypes and the
probable biases of the mostly male raters on evaluations. For example, a study of the 1984 and
1985 rating reports of 26 women and 51 men who joined the Minneapolis Police Department
after 1980 found that women's median scores were worse than men's on all but three of the 24
measures included in the evaluation form (Byrne and Oakes 1986:Al 1-12). The gender gap
was greatest in categories related to aggressiveness. For instance, 40 percent of the men, but
only 5 percent of the women, received the top two ratings for "controlling conflict through both
physical skill and voice command. Men got higher ratings even on appearance, ostensibly
because they look more like police. Women outscored men only in two measures of report
writing, and were rated equal in relationships with the public.

Police organizations persist in assessing women's performance "by the male standard". This
obscures the fact that the crime fighting model embraced by "a predominantly male-oriented
police system has failed to prevent, deter, or resolve crimes that have been brought to its
attention" (Bell 1982:119-120).

Doing Gender on the Street

When women workers enter men's turf they usually are required implicitly to accept men's definitions
of that work and the behavioural scripts designed by and for men workers. Thus, even when women
do police patrol, job tasks and service styles remain gendered. A central element of policing across
situations and tasks is the need to gain control and maintain respect for police authority. Although both
men and women officers may perform policing tasks, the meanings of such activities remain associated
with manhood and must be addressed as the officers do masculine dominance. For women in policing,
this means finding ways to deal with citizens' perceptions, interactions, and challenges to authority.

In police-citizen interactions the officer seeks to take control, but faces uncertainties arising
from incomplete information about the citizen and the situation. Citizens often are reluctant to
talk to an officer or may behave in inappropriate ways. They may seek to disrupt normal
interaction by disavowing the officer's identity as a member of the police and relate "person to
person", refocussing the interaction on irrelevant statuses, such as gender or race-ethnicity to
gain an advantage (Goffman 196 1 ).

Citizens generally defer to police officers, who tend to have higher status than most citizens
they encounter. At any time, however, reference to an officer's lower "irrelevant"
characteristics may reverse the flow of deference and threaten the officer's control of the
situation. Such interruptions are more prevalent for officers with devalued race-ethnic and/or
gender statuses. Thus, how officers and citizens "do gender" in these situations depends on the
sex categories of the participants, the specific circumstances, and the meaning of gender in the
situational context. A woman cop may be called "officer", but still is judged in terms of gender
stereotypes and pressured to prove that she is "an 'essentially' feminine being, despite
appearances to the contrary" (West and Zimmerman 1987:140).

Because police work has been so closely associated with men and masculinity, the ways that
men officers do gender as they do dominance have been treated as natural and thus have been
virtually invisible. The close association of authority and control with masculinity, however,
makes interactions with citizens more problematic for women cops, who must find ways to
limit attention to their sex category, or take advantage of it.

The interpersonal resources available to officers and citizens' expectations of culturally

dominant images of "masculine" behaviour tend to put women at a disadvantage on street
patrol. Women police, in order to gain and maintain credibility as officers, must avoid smiling
and appearing friendly (except, of course, as "Officer Friendly", a title that explicitly reverses
the stereotype of police for the sake of "community relations"), and must demand deference
rather than deferring to others.

In police-citizen encounters, four possible combinations of gender and social category may
arise: men officers with men or women citizens, and women officers with men or women
citizens. Each combination has different expectations and management problems, as police
relate to citizens by "doing gender" while "doing dominance" or in otherwise enact the police
role.

When male officers interact with male citizens their shared manhood can be effectively used as an
interpersonal resource in some situations by the officers. Generally this is to the citizen's advantage
since it says, in effect, "act like a man (read: exercise self-control) and I won't have to exert my
authority as an officer to overpower you". It also benefits the officer by minimizing the necessity of
using force and enables him to act as a "good guy", giving a little to gain compliance. When suspects
or offenders attempt to define the situation in terms of shared manhood, however, officers may view
the interaction as a denial of the deference owed to their office. When a male officer relies too heavily
on the authority of the badge or rejects a male citizen's effort to be treated as a man, the result is a "duel
of manhood" with a high probability of a verbal or physical confrontation that might have been avoided
(Martin 1980).

Male officers' double status superiority over women citizens generally leads to few problems arising in
such interactions except those related to sexuality. The men may use the authority of their office to
control or gain compliance from women who may have gotten "shrill" by calling on them to "act like a
lady" (read: behave in a calm, dignified manner) to gain chivalrous treatment. If invoking the rules of
chivalry works, the officer has maintained control while enhancing his sense of manly generosity. If it
fails, he still may treat the woman as a wayward "girl" on whom he will not waste his time, or use
force.

Interactions between female officers and male citizens are problematic because police expect to
take control of situations and be shown deference by citizens; men may defer to the office but
resist being controlled by or being deferential to a woman. Thus expectations regarding how a
man relates to a woman and to a police officer generally differ and often conflict. In fact,
women officers generally are given deference, either out of gender-blind respect for the
uniform or because doing so does not challenge a male citizen's manhood if he chivalrously
complies. Conversely, fighting a woman (particularly when men are witnesses) may cause a
male citizen loss of status, whether he wins or loses the physical encounter.

The problem for a woman officer, however, is that men may revoke their deference,
particularly if she is "unladylike" and acts "like a cop". Since women are often at a physical
disadvantage, they may have to rely on the deference of male citizens as a control strategy.
Although female officers generally try to minimize rather than activate their gender status, they
recognize that men seek to redefine situations so as to affirm male status superiority.

When women officers encounter sexist or sexual comments that intrude on but do not alter the
outcome of an interaction, they generally ignore them, as is expected of officers in the face of a
variety of citizen verbal abuse. In dealing with offenders some women draw on citizens'
stereotypes that are "trigger happy" or are emotional in the face of danger. Some draw on
familial roles or social stereotypes such as "matriarch" or "aggressive bitch" in asserting
authority.

Other strategies by which women officers gain situational control involve use of various verbal
and nonverbal cues to convey through voice, appearance, facial expression, and body postures
that they are to be taken seriously regardless of their physical stature. Learning to transmit
these messages, however, often requires changing such habits as smiling and literally learning
how to stand up to people.

In dealing with women citizens, female officers get both greater cooperation and more hassles
than male officers. While their common gender status implies a reduction of social distance, it
revokes the special consideration that female citizens expect from (male) police, and for this
reason, may evoke the female citizen's resistance. Conversely, women officers often are
viewed as more sympathetic and so are able to gain the cooperation of female citizens,
particularly victims.

Effective officers of both genders appeal both to gender-appropriate behaviour on the part of
citizens, and to their respect for the officer's authority to gain cooperation. They use a citizen's
expectations and values to their advantage, draw on mutually shared statuses to diminish social
distance, and only rely on the authority of their office when necessary. Ineffective officers, on
the other hand, either too rigidly rely on their formal authority or cannot transcend the
limitations on their behaviour posed by adherence to traditional norms for doing gender. For
female officers this means failure to use the authority of their office and over-reliance on
deference to them as women; for male officers this means overemphasis on aggressive macho
behaviour that may result in an avoidable confrontation.

Policy Issues for this Decade and Beyond

Numerical increases and the passage of time have only slightly reduced the barriers and
limitations women officers face. Moreover, new problems and challenges arise for women as
they move into new assignments and supervisory positions. This @ section explores the policy
implications of my gender construction or "doing gender" approach and identifies several
issues for future policy change and research.

Policy Implications of the Gender Construction Approach

Earlier explanations of the barriers women encounter in traditionally male occupations rest on a
static view of gender and propose oversimplified policy solutions. For example, the gender
role approach explains women's difficulties in non-traditional jobs as arising from differences
in the childhood socialization patterns of boys and girls that instill different occupational
aspirations and capabilities in men and women. Kanter s (I 977) gender-neutral structural
approach argues that women's and men's behaviour on the job is determined by three structural
conditions related to the demands of their job (both formal and informal): the amount of power
they have on the job, the opportunity associated with that position, and their proportionate
representation on the job.

Both of these approaches imply that men and women are essentially similar and, further, that if
women receive the same treatment as men, through gender-neutral childhood socialization and
the elimination of discrimination in education and jobs, then their behaviour will be similar.
Thus policies should focus on assuring equal opportunities and the rest will follow.

Other scholars have focused on the differences between men and women, arguing that
there are discrete feminine values and that introducing significant numbers of women

will change organizations. Advocates for putting women on patrol, for example, asserted that women
would diffuse violence and improve police- community relations. This difference view also treats
gender as a more or less fixed aspect of individual identity. In addition, it diverts attention from the
similarities between men and women and the differences among women with respect to work- related
attitudes and job performance and implies, for instance, that there is a women's style of policing.

In contrast, I have argued that gender is a fundamental organizing feature of life in work
organizations, affecting virtually every social context. Even when women' seek to avoid being
treated as women, their actions continue to be held accountable by others and by themselves as
appropriately feminine or not. Unlike both the sameness and the difference approaches, for the
gender construction approach, (t)he goal is neither simple assimilation nor moral superiority
but to transform the nature and operation of work organizations and the political-economic
system (Martin and Jurik 1996: 223). Recognizing the pervasive effects of gender on
organizational behaviour is the first step toward such change. What does this suggest as the
key issues arising for women police in the next decade? I will briefly note five: moving
beyond token status; promotions; turnover, community-based policing; and pregnancy policies.

Numbers: The Effects of Moving Beyond Token Status

Despite steady growth in numbers of women at all ranks, women continue to be significantly
underrepresented in police work and to suffer the adverse consequences of their token status.
What is the likely effect of moving beyond token status? Kanter (1977) has suggested that as
the proportional representation of a group increases the negative effects of tokenism diminish.
In contrast, researchers of race relations (Blalock 1967; Giles 1977) suggest that minority
individuals are less likely to be accepted by dominants when there are enough of them to
threaten the economic and political security of the majority. Discrimination increases as the
minority grows larger and more powerful. A study testing these competing perspectives found
that token women did not face more severe organizational pressure than nontokens but that
increasing the number of minority workers without altering the relations between dominants
and subordinates probably would not improve the position of minorities substantially, and
might even worsen relations (South et al. 1982). Other studies also cast doubt on the assertion
that an increase in number alone will relieve the problems of tokenism for women (Gruber and
Bjorn 1982; Deaux and Ullman 1984). Thus, increasing the number of women in policing
alone will not end the occupational dilemmas posed by sexism since the organizational
structures supporting gender inequality remain in place. In fact, as women move up the
organizational hierarchy, they again become tokens and encounter challenges to their authority
from men who may tolerate working with women but resist working for them.

Promotions and Women as Supervisors

In the US, only a small proportion of women has moved into supervisory ranks: in 1993 they
comprised 7.1 % of supervisory personnel in the 50 largest US cities (Walker and Martin 1994)
but were concentrated at the bottom of the police hierarchy. Questions arise with respect to
women's opportunities for attaining higher rank, particularly top management positions that are
based on political decisions rather than

standardized examinations. Moreover, if the pace of promotion over the past 20 years
continues, women are not likely to assume departmental policy-making positions for many
years. Thus the question that women face is how to overcome the limits of the glass ceiling
that women managers have encountered in other occupations.

When women get promoted, they encounter not only the difficulties faced by all new
supervisors (i.e., adopting an effective supervisory style and thinking like management), but
added dilemmas in trying to do gender as supervisors. They often lack mentors to help them
and are subjected to more testing of their authority than new male sergeants. Worse yet, as
psychological studies have found, people tend to associate the strategies and styles most
connected with competence (i.e., direct rather than manipulative; concrete resource
mobilization rather than personal) with masculinity. Moreover, while all styles may be
effective if used by a man, masculine styles were found not to be effective when used by a
woman (Schein 1975; Harriman 1985). Thus women supervisors face a dilemma: they can
manipulate and be unrecognized or be direct and risk ineffectiveness and hostility. Not
surprisingly, in a survey of women police eligible for promotion, Wexler and Quinn (1985)
found that nearly half the women stated that their greatest concern in being a sergeant was
related to the negative reception they expected within the department.

Turnover
A recent study of men and women's labor market behaviour found both an unexpectedly high
proportion of women entering male-dominated jobs and a high turnover rate as well (Jacobs
1989). This led the author to conclude that the barriers to women's entry are lower than
expected, but that employment in male-dominated occupations is less a permanent achievement
for women than a temporary pass through a revolving door.

Findings on gender differences in turnover rates in policing are inconsistent. Women had
significantly higher turnover rates than men in the California Highway Patrol, (California
Highway Patrol 1976) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Linden and Minch, 1984).
Other studies (IACP, 1977; Sulton and Townsey, 1981) have found similar male and female
turnover rates in municipal departments. My research (Martin 1990) found some support for
both similarities and differences. In 303 municipal departments, women's turnover rate during
1986 (6.3 percent) was only slightly higher than men's (4.6 percent); in state police agencies,
where their representation was substantially lower and resistance to their presence stronger, the
gap was much greater (i.e., 8.9 percent for women versus 2.9 percent for men).

Women's higher turnover rates both perpetuate the problems of tokenism and affect on
women's promotion opportunities. If they enter and leave policing faster than men, a smaller
proportion accumulate seniority and experience necessary for promotion. Moreover, rapid
turnover creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, serving as a reason not to hire women who appear to
lack the proper dedication for the job, while their treatment by co-workers serves to discourage
women from remaining in hostile working conditions. How to reduce women's frequent
separations (or more effectively select women who will remain and succeed) is an important
policy issue.

Women and Community-Based Policing

In the 1980s in the US, community-based policing became the watchword for gaining public
support by linking the officer to the community and citizens in the co-production of crime
control and public safety services (Skolnick and Bayley 1986). Community-based policing
requires police organizations to reconceptualize what is real police work, changing the focus
from individual crimes to recurrent problems that affect order and public services. It also
demands officers who are trained in problem identification, analysis. solutions, and
interpersonal skills.

The extent to which such programs go beyond rhetoric and actually redefine the police role is still
unclear. However, since community-based policing offers the prospect of a shift away from crime
fighting toward greater emphasis on crime prevention and problem solving it might be regarded as
feminising the management of social control. Are women more likely to adapt to and succeed in this
new style? Will this, in turn, engender a backlash against both women and community policing?

Pregnancy Policy

Despite great strides in assuring legal equality, in the US the harder issue of how to deal
equitably with biological differences between the sexes remain unresolved. Because only
women can get pregnant, there is no way within our legal framework to treat men and women
equally and equitably at the same time.

Underlying the American legal framework is the assumption that men and women naturally and
biologically occupy different roles in life and that being a worker and mother are incompatible.
This has resulted in maternity leave and other employment policies that put hardships on
women. In fact, in the 1970s our Supreme Court ruled that employers did not violate Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act by denying sick-leave disability insurance or health insurance coverage
to female employees to cover disabilities resulting from normal pregnancy. Congress
responded by passing the Pregnancy Disability Act in 1978, broadening the definition of sex
discrimination to encompass pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions. However,
the law left the equal treatment/special treatment question unresolved, as have two apparently
contradictory Supreme Court decisions which leave it up to each state to decide whether to give
pregnant women more favourable treatment than other workers that are physically unable to
work.

Because police work poses the risk of unpredictable physical hazards, pregnancy raises a
number of questions which often are not covered by departmental or municipal personnel
policies. Many American departments now have light duty policies that pen-nit officers who
are temporarily disabled to work in noncontact positions. But there still are no uniform policies
or common practices with respect to: (1) the point at which the pregnant woman becomes
disabled and, thereby, unfit for patrol or other duties; (2) the person(s) who make the
determination of whether the woman should be reassigned or forced to take extended leave;
and (3) the assignments that are suitable for an officer on light duty. As the number of officers
who are pregnant at the same time increases and deployment problems grow, there is increasing
need for consistent

and clearly articulated policies to assure both adequate protection of the community
and of the rights of pregnant officers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, although the most blatant barriers to women in police work have fallen, and
women are entering policing in increasing numbers, they still encounter an organization that is
far from gender neutral. Rather, their options and opportunities for advancement are limited by
the gendered work culture; male colleagues who resent and resist their presence as a threat to
their occupational solidarity and self-image as men's men; interactional barriers including sexist
language, sexual harassment, performance pressures, paternalism, and gender-related
stereotypes; and gendered organizational policies and practices that disadvantage women by
valuing and rewarding characteristics and qualities associated with masculinity. These barriers
and handicaps are built into the gendered work structures and patterns governing male/female
interaction and continuously force each woman officer to think like a man, work like a dog, and
act like a lady (Martin, 1980: 219).

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