ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the different career preferences and aspirations for male and female police students. The police profession is still a male-dominated profession. This questions whether men and women have divergent aspirations for specific police tasks. Based on the answers from the RECPOL students at the beginning and end of their education, the results show that both male and female police students develop a preference for a narrower scope of police tasks during their police education. Across preferences, the female police students’ profiles display similarities as well as country particularities. Overall, male police recruits largely aspire to tasks that are action/street orientated (doing uniformed patrol work, working in a special operations unit) compared to the female police recruits. The preference for investigative police work, on the other hand, is a frequent preference among female police students in all countries. Regarding leadership aspirations, the authors do not find any differences between men and women, although students have different leadership aspirations in the different countries. The results in the chapter call for more research into the shaping of preferences for future job tasks as police officers.
