UC Riverside

It is well-documented that women police officers face a male-dominated workplace and cultural expectations of masculinity among the police. Women officers report unequal pay, stalled career mobility, gendered work assignments, and harassment and discrimination. However, less is known about how structural and cultural factors inform intersectional gender inequality within police agencies. I use Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered institutions to illuminate the ways in which police agencies create and perpetuate inequality. This dissertation examines how 20 women officers from two locations within the United States—California and Louisiana—experience and respond to structural and cultural inequality in their workplace. Despite efforts to reduce gender and sexual harassment and discrimination in police organizations in recent decades, participants described ongoing unequal practices at the workplace. This project provides support for past research on women police officers and advances the literature by considering the role of location in women’s experiences and understanding of workplace gender inequality. While the prevalence of harassment and discrimination was consistent across locations, participants in Louisiana were less likely to criticize the paramilitary structure of policing or respond to harassment and discrimination through formal or legal channels. Women officers of color in the California sample were also more likely to be hired as part of a federally imposed consent decree and to be tasked with unique forms of emotional labor that were not required of their white female colleagues or male colleagues of color. Finally, in line with the tenets of feminist scholarship, I provide policy recommendations to both improve working conditions for women officers and improve access to detailed data on inequality in police organizations for researchers.