ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a systematic overview of the empirical knowledge about gender differences in police attitudes towards ethical behaviour. We analysed 25 empirical studies exploring gender differences in police ethics and integrity in a number of countries, including Australia, Estonia, Mexico, Nigeria, Romania, Slovenia, Uganda, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results of these studies are not uniform and show a great extent of divergence in terms of potential gender effects on the police officers’ attitudes towards police ethics and integrity. Gender seems to be systematically related to the respondents’ assessments of misconduct seriousness in 7 out of 17 studies, to the views about discipline in 2 out of 7 studies and to the expressed willingness to report in 6 out of 16 studies. Our conclusions align with the previous studies that documented no systematic pattern of meaningful differences based on police officer gender, suggesting that female officers have either adapted to the predominantly male culture of policing and/or that the women who ‘self-select’ into the profession are more likely to adapt to the existent culture of policing.
