UC Berkeley

Can gender-based "enclaves" facilitate women's access to justice? I create an unprecedented dataset based on millions of police-reports from 2015, and leverage the manner in which institutions called all-women police stations were opened in Haryana state, India. I find that the creation of enclaves in law enforcement does not increase registered crime. In fact, the intervention lowers the case load at standard stations by justifying the deflection of gendered crimes, reduces responsibilities for policewomen, and increases travel cost for victims seeking redress. The institutions formalize the "counseling" of victims by encouraging reconciliation with abusers at the expense of case registration. Broadly, I argue that 'representation as separation' may fail to generate positive outcomes for victims and administrators.

In a second paper, I highlight the patterns of exclusion faced by women in law enforcement. By classifying India's Penal Code, and leveraging an instrument, I demonstrate that policewomen are tasked with specific cases, especially non-heinous gendered crimes that the bureaucracy prefers to address informally. Nevertheless, female supervisors are able to mitigate such occupational segregation; they allocate policewomen diverse tasks, and they play a causal role in assigning female investigators more cases.

In a third paper, Sharon Barnhardt and I examine whether the link between representation and perceived legitimacy of public officials is moderated by the roles women are seen to perform within an agency. With the help of a novel video-based experiment, we find that context matters: policewomen are seen as more legitimate when tackling non-gendered cases compared to gendered crimes - especially by other women. The findings contribute to scholarship on gender and the conditions under which representation can improve trust in public officials.