Women in the Police Academy: A National-Level Exploration of the Gendered Nature of Non-Completion

Abstract

The underrepresentation of women in policing is well documented as are efforts to understand the disparity. Some of these efforts have examined the first point newly hired women experience occupational socialization: basic law enforcement training at police academies nationwide. Largely absent from this line of research are studies of why women recruits—compared to men—fail to successfully complete basic training. To fill this empirical void, the current inquiry utilizes national-level data to examine the reasons women, compared to men, fail to complete academy basic training. Our results reveal statistically significant gendered differences in reasons for training non-completion by level of stress emphasized during training and type of academy affiliation that include voluntary withdrawal by recruits and non-voluntary withdrawal for failure to meet qualifying standards for physical fitness, firearms, and driving. The implications of these findings for police practice and research are discussed and recommendations are made.

Keywords:

• Police
• training academies
• police recruits
• gender
• women

Notes

1 “Recruits” are individuals who have been hired by a law enforcement agency (or have sponsored themselves) and are completing the first step toward certification as a sworn police officer.

2 A fourth wave of data, collected during 2018, has now been collected and BJS has released preliminary statistical tables for the survey (Buehler, 2021).

3 CLETA data are available for downloading from https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/NACJD/studies/36764.

4 A “class” of recruits is a term-of-art referring to a group of individual that began and ended basic training at the same time.

5 The survey instrument is available for downloading from https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/CLETA2013.pdf.

6 While Reaves (2016) also presents training completion percentages and reasons for involuntary non-completion of basic training by gender (Reaves, 2016, Figure 12, Table 16), we extend Reaves’ analysis to include non-completion by gender and level of stress and non-completion by gender and academy affiliation. Unlike Reaves (2016), we excluded from our analyses any academy that had missing data on any of the study variables because we determined the missing data were non-random.

7 BJS subsequently created a new category, “special jurisdiction,” to replace “other.”

8 To ensure that sample size was appropriate for difference of proportion testing, we used an online sample size calculator available at https://www2.ccrb.cuhk.edu.hk/stat/proportion/Casagrande.htm.