Attitudes toward womenin the Swedish police force

This study is aimed to investigate attitudes toward women in the Swedish police force. The main question was to see if there were any difference in the answers by men and women. I have tested 58 male and 28 female police officers, with explicit and implicit instruments. The respondents finished a self-report survey containing a scale for attitudes toward women in the police, the Classic Sexism scale and the Modern Sexism scale. To measure implicit attitudes, the implicit association test was used, where the respondents associated pictures of male and female police officers with positive and negative stimuli words. The data were analyzed using multivariate and univariate analysis of variance. The results showed that men and women do differ significantly on both the explicit and implicit measure. Despite this, there were no negative attitudes to be found in the explicit measure. The implicit measure showed that both men and women show a preference for their own gender when it comes to associate gender and competence as a police officer