Female Police Officers’ Cultural Perceptions of the External Work Environment

Abstract

Many scholars have detailed the exclusion of female police officers from the traditional masculine occupational culture that endorses a detached suspicion of the public as a result of the inherent dangers of the street. Relatively few studies have directly examined how female officers perceive or respond to facets of this external (community) working environment. The present study uses survey data from officers in a large, urban police department to test for gender differences in two aspects of the external environment that are core to police cultural attitudes: perceptions of danger and suspiciousness toward civilians. Findings show that female officers perceive more danger and are more suspicious of civilians than their male colleagues do, though the differences are modest in magnitude. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Keywords:

• Women in policing
• danger in policing
• police culture
• female police officers

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gender data came from the survey question “What is your gender?,” allowing respondents to self-report based on their gender identity. An “other” category was provided along with “male” and “female.” No respondents chose this option.

2 The low alpha for the law-enforcement scale is typical of similar scales used in previous research (e.g., Gau et al., 2013; Paoline & Gau, 2018). It could be that more than three items are needed to ensure content validity for this role orientation; Cochran and Bromley’s (2003) 13-item scale had an alpha of.76. The present scale, though, is an improvement over single-item measures seen in much previous work (e.g., Engel & Worden, 2003; Ingram et al., 2013; Paoline, 2004). The alpha for the order-maintenance scale is also in line with that seen in previous research (e.g., Gau & Paoline, 2017).