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Upon receiving this assignment, we were drawn to a number of potential topics. These included women’s reproductive health, restorative justice education for women in prisons, and finally, women in law enforcement. To make our decision, we did cursory searches in Sociological Abstracts to see what materials were already available, as well as reading through Wikipedia to determine what gaps there were in the source. From here, we realized that quite a bit has already been written on women’s reproductive health in prisons, and we had limited resources to explore restorative justice efforts specifically for incarcerated women. Furthermore, given the sparse information on women in law enforcement on Wikipedia, we decided to pursue this last option. This decision was also informed by our personal interest in what draws women to this profession and how these motivations interact with public views of them as law enforcers.

Women in law enforcement seemed like a fairly large undertaking for one project. In order to streamline this line of inquiry, we conducted targeted searches of the available literature in sociology and criminology. Through searching Sociological Abstracts, JSTOR and Criminology we noticed a trend in subject material. The search terms we used included: “women and law enforcement”; “policewomen;” and “ female prison guards”, among others.  Most articles discussed discrimination within the law enforcement profession or women’s perspectives on their roles in the profession. Since Wikipedia has significant content on discrimination in the field already, we decided to pursue the latter theme.

Crime and the Media

Public perceptions of women in law enforcement are largely influenced by media portrayals. Like representations of female offenders (Miller 2001), characterizations tend to vacillate between portrayals of stereotypical female traits and the adoption of traditional masculine patterns of behavior. Popular television series such as Orange is the New Black rely on traditional tropes at the crux of femininity and policing, particularly in the role of the female CO Susan Fischer, who constantly makes efforts to connect with inmates on an emotional level. A more complex image of women in law enforcement emerges when considering Big Mama Morton from the musical Chicago, portrayed as nurturing and empathetic on one hand, and tough and enterprising on the other.

Our research question concerns how women perceive their lived experiences and roles in the law enforcing professions. Informing this question is our personal interest in popular representations of women in law enforcement, however, this focus on the media may not be where our research leads us. Our interest in women’s self-conceptions in the roles of “correctional officer,” “SWAT team member,” “beat cop,” “detective,” or “policewoman” will hopefully remain our focus. We recognize that these professional identities are multiple and wide-ranging, but we intentionally chose to keep our focus broad at this early point in our research.

So far, our preliminary research has been fruitful. Sociological Abstracts and JSTOR have yielded promising results, and we have made interlibrary loan requests for pertinent articles and books. Thematically, these sources range from discussions of tokenism, self-efficacy, gender based discrimination, solidarity between female officers, and historical accounts of women in the profession. We hope that these diverse sources will aid in our future investigation on women.

Our research plan going forward is to begin with a general overview of the literature on this topic so far. We are planning on reading Heideson’s (1992) book-length work on women in law enforcement to gain an understanding of how scholars have treated this topic in the past. We also look forward to exploring more contemporary work, including that of  Corsianos (2009) which contains segments directly related women’s lived experiences in the policing profession. After reviewing these larger sources, we plan on delving into relevant sociological and criminological articles and case studies. Potential options include a case study on female SWAT team members (Dodge et. al 2010)  as well as a close look at the intersections of race and gender in local law enforcement in Detroit, Michigan . We plan to include perspectives about intersectional identities that impact women’s experience of gender in law-enforcement professions.

Similarly multiplicitous is the interdisciplinary nature of our study, which draws upon work not only in sociology,  but also criminology, psychology, and anthropology. We hope to draw these multiple threads together to provide a holistic and accurate portrayal of how women negotiate their roles in law enforcement when confronted with external expectations and popular representations.