WOMEN AND POLICE CULTURE IN VICTORIA

We detect four principal propositions in much of the literature on women in policing. First, women make good police officers; they are equal to their male colleagues in most conventional policing roles, and they are arguably better than those colleagues in conflict-resolution roles. Second, and despite the first, women have been discriminated against enduringly in their attempts to enter policing, and to stay and flourish within policing; they have faced formidable structural impediments to equal selection, deployment and promotion, and they face hostility and sexist behaviour from male-dominated police culture. Third, women are forced to adapt to male-dominated culture in order to survive in policing; they do this by conforming to behaviours along a continuum of defeminisation at one end to deprofessionalisation at the other. Fourth, improvements to the lot of women in policing require a fundamental reformulation of the male-dominated culture of policing, now that the formal structural impediments to full integration have at least been recognised, if not totally eradicated. The available evidence in support of aspects of the first two propositions above i