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Abstract:
In spite of the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, Title VII provisions and various executive orders prohibiting discrimination in human resource practices, female police officers remain heavily concentrated in the lowest level positions of many police departments in the United States. To date, the only solution for improving the employment status of women in policing has been affirmative action. While affirmative action plans/initiatives have lead to some improvements in female officers' statuses, additional progress could be made if the plans were strongly enforced by all police departments. This work explores police officers' perceptions of the impact that affirmative action plans/initiatives have had on the recruitment, hiring, promotion, and retention of female officers. Using convenience sampling, 109 currently employed sworn male and female police officers from the three largest police departments in a rural area of the South were surveyed. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques were used to analyze the findings. The data revealed that the number of female police officers in the departments studied was small. The data suggests that there is a lack of enforcement of affirmative action plans/initiatives by each department.
Keywords*: Affirmative Action; quotas; glass ceiling; gender discrimination; representative bureaucracy; small town
Keyword Notes*
Affirmative Action. The term is used to refer to plans that provide preferred treatment for groups that had historically been discriminated against by law and custom.
Quotas. Arrangements in which a certain percentage of openings are reserved for particular groups.
Glass Ceiling. An imaginary barrier that inhibits women and minorities from reaching ranks above entry level.
Gender Discrimination. Any unjust treatment in favor of or against one gender as compared to another.
Plan. The term is used to refer to a police department's affirmative action policy.
Representative Bureaucracy. The term is used to refer to a system in which public employees are seen as representatives of various segments of the population rather than as neutral civil servants.
Reverse Discrimination. The term is used to refer to the belief that women and minorities are given preferential treatment as was the case historically with white individuals and males.
Sexual Harassment. A form of sex discrimination that includes but is not limited to unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors, and verbal or...