NCJ Number
142310
Journal
Policing and Society Volume: 3 Issue: 2 Dated: (1993) Pages: 121-136
Date Published
1993
Length
16 pages
Annotation
The present study evaluated the possible gender bias exhibited in the deployment practices of a provisional British police force, whose total number of officers exceeded 3,000, 10 percent of whom were women. The sample studied here included 32 male police constables, 31 female police constables, and 23 male sergeants.
Abstract
The questionnaire completed by the participants asked them to rate themselves on a range of attributes and to indicate how often they had been deployed on each of ten listed assignments. In terms of their self-ratings, female police constables were more like their male counterparts than different. There were gender differences in only 4 out of 17 attributes; women rated themselves more likely to have effective listening skills and to show consideration for others while men rated themselves more highly in terms of physical strength and the ability to use force. When the sergeants in the sample rated men and women constables in these attributes, their judgments corresponded with the self- ratings. In evaluating the patterns of male and female constable deployments, there seemed to be a conscious effort at skill task matching; sergeants tended to deploy men or women to situations which required their strongest attributes. However, there was some evidence to suggest that male officers were more likely to be dispatched in cases where there was no observed or perceived gender differences in the required attribute. Therefore, the findings indicated that female police constables do suffer to some degree from differential deployment based on gender bias. 3 tables and 22 references