“The Officer’s WIFE Was Driving the Police Car”: The Use of Humor to Navigate the Gendered Institution of Policing

• In Event: Barriers Remain: Understanding how Women Enter and Navigate the Policing Profession

Abstract

There is limited research that explicitly examines humor as a coping strategy for women nor how it may help negotiate the challenges of working in the gendered institution of policing. Drawing from in-depth semi-structured interviews of 47 female officers from 30 law enforcement agencies across seven states, we apply tenets of narrative criminology (Presser, 2009) to learn more about the role that humor plays in the narrated identities of women in policing who continue to face barriers such as sexism, discrimination, resentment, assumptions about sexual identity, accusations of promiscuity, perceptions of limited capacity and tokenism in policing.

Authors

• Tara O’Connor Shelley, Tarleton State University

• Melissa S. Morabito, University of Massachusetts, Lowell