Gender, Police Culture, and Structured Ambivalence: Navigating ‘Fit' with the Brotherhood, Boys’ Club, and Sisterhood

• Author: Carrie B. Sanders,Julie Gouweloos,Debra Langan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15570851221098040
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Feminist Criminology

2022, Vol. 17(5) 641–660

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851221098040

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Gender, Police Culture, and

Structured Ambivalence:

Navigating ‘Fit’with the

Brotherhood, Boys’Club, and

Sisterhood

Carrie B. Sanders

1

, Julie Gouweloos

2,

*, and Debra Langan

1

Abstract

Women are increasingly represented in policing; however, inclusion alone will not

eradicate existing structural and cultural barriers to meaningful change. Insights from

interviews with ninety-one Canadian women police of varied rank and tenure,

demonstrate women’s experiences of structured ambivalence as they strategically

deploy and resist gendered policing narratives of the Brotherhood, Boys’Club, and

Sisterhood to negotiate their own ‘f‌it.’In this way, they both challenge and reinforce

gendered boundaries that create barriers to meaningful transformation. These f‌indings

demonstrate the need for change initiatives to address the complex and ever-shifting

role of gender in policing organizations.

Keywords

policing, gender, culture, brotherhood, boys’club, sisterhood

The representation of women in policing continues to increase across the globe with

some police services having between 25% and 30% female off‌icers, and between 30%

and 50% female recruits (Prenzler, 2020). However, this progress has been ‘extremely

1

Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford, ON, Canada

2

McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Julie Gouweloos, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 1P9, Canada.

Email: gouwelj@mcmaster.ca

patchy’with most women holding patrol level positions and a much smaller number

entering specialized units (e.g., Guns and Gangs, Homicide), management, and senior

management positions (Prenzler, 2020, p. 439). In Canada, women comprise 22.2% of

the total police population with less than 19% of senior off‌icer positions

1

being held by

women (Conor et al., 2020). While numbers have been increasing, we caution against

equating the slow rise in women’s presence in policing with gender equity. In fact, we

contend that simply increasing the number of women in policing will not, in and of

itself, create meaningful organizational change. Our f‌indings theorize the structured

ambivalence women express toward gender in policing. Specif‌ically, women draw on

and resist cultural resources of the Brotherhood, Boys’Club, and Sisterhood to make

sense of and navigate their f‌it within the hierarchical structure of policing. They do so in

ways that both challenge and reinforce the gendered boundaries that create barriers to

change. As such, we argue that for meaningful cultural change to be achieved, or-

ganizations must account for women’s complex and ever-shifting navigation of gender

in police organizations.

Within the literature there is a long-standing recognition that policing is a ‘masculine

culture’(Manning, 1978), one that is gendered at individual, cultural, and structural

levels (Silvestri, 2017). However, more recent work has proffered the need to rethink

overbroad conceptions of police culture (see Campeau, 2015;Silvestri, 2017). Spe-

cif‌ically, Campeau (2015) argues against the perception of police culture as being either

a monolithic set of values or individualized typologies (e.g., street cop or management

cop culture), and instead regards police culture as a “repertoire of skills that are de-

ployed in order to bring justif‌ication to their experiences”(p. 669). We take up

Campeau’s (2015) approach to police culture as a “resourceful tool”paying specif‌ic

attention to understanding how women use cultural resources, including the Broth-

erhood, Boys’Club, and Sisterhood, to make sense of their experiences and navigate

their ‘f‌it’(Rabe-Hemp, 2009) within the hierarchical institution of policing.

The existence of a Boys’Club–the entrenched gendered hierarchy within policing

that often excludes women from inclusion, promotion, and full participation–has been

widely documented in the policing literature (see Campeau, 2019;Fielding, 1994;

Langan et al., 2019;Rabe-Hemp, 2008;2009). The Brotherhood also plays a prominent

role in policing literature. Often used to connote solidarity, the ‘thin blue line,’or a

sense of family, the Brotherhood is a core constituent of police culture. Perhaps un-

surprisingly, far less has been said about the existence of a Sisterhood–a shared sense of

solidarity among women.

2

Our work pushes policing culture theory in new directions

by unpacking the complex and at times contradictory ways in which women strate-

gically navigate these three prominent cultural resources. Specif‌ically, we ask, how do

women understand, deploy, and resist conceptions of the Brotherhood, Boys’Club, and

Sisterhood to negotiate their own f‌it within their policing cultures?

642 Feminist Criminology 17(5)