Does Gender Representation Impact Policing? Women's Police Stations in India

• In Event: The Gendered State and Women's Equality

Abstract

Does gender representation for women in the police change attitudes and behavior toward law enforcement? Relatedly, are women police more accommodating to female victims of crime? While scholars have shown that gender representation in political institutions has positive effects on improving public goods provision or perceptions of women in politics (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Beaman et al. 2009), researchers have not systematically investigated women’s representation in law enforcement, especially in the developing world. My paper leverages unusual policy initiatives in India: the implementation of a 33 percent quota for women in law enforcement and the creation of AWPS or all-women police stations, i.e. stations run by women officers for female victims. Using the first nationally representative crime victimization survey, ethnographic research across north India, and micro-level crime data, I show that the institutional design of AWPS is flawed. I introduce a new comprehensive data-set of over a million police station reports from 2015 to 2018, and estimate the causal effect of the reforms before and after their implementation in one Indian state. I find that while the inclusion of women in the police is essential, AWPS are symbolic measures with little substantive impact; they do not increase women’s’ comfort with reporting crime, and in fact type-cast women officers as ‘counselors’.

Author

• Nirvikar Jassal, UC Berkeley