How policewomen's experiences of 'male construct' interact with sustainability of career development and promotion practices : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
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Date
2019
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Massey University
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Abstract
Women in today’s New Zealand Police organisation work across almost all roles
and ranks, including 14 percent representation at commissioned and non-commissioned
officer level. Disparities relating to women and men’s access to senior and high-level
roles and workgroups continue to challenge police, despite new policy and performance
initiatives for cultural reform. Understanding how policewomen’s experiences of police
as a gendered organisation interact with sustainability of career development and
promotion practices exposes the rules of formation that permit the conditions and
outcomes of structural processes and practices that engender women in police as they
negotiate their career progression strategies. 28 policewomen at commissioned and
non-commissioned officer ranks were interviewed in a semi-structured conversational
style about their experiences. A Foucauldian discourse analysis was applied, attending
to the gendered social power relations that define and delimit social practice and the
governance of women, both within and outside the workplace. The analysis showed
that dominant heteronormative discourses regulate policewomen’s practices of gender
coherence within a hegemonic socio-cultural discourse of masculinist rationalisation
that differentiates male / female, masculine /feminine as contingent subject positions
and investments in compliance and/or resistance to social institutions of work and
family. Furthermore, women were positioned within and through discourse as
neoliberal active gendering agents whose subjection to, and mastery of, masculinist
ideals for leadership shape career progression as the strategic navigation of work and
family commitments in accordance with a duplicitous and inegalitarian system.
Alternate realities were also presented as reproducing and re-producing masculine
values and the gender order for progression in the police hierarchy. This research
contributes to the paucity of scholarship attending to the career progression experiences
of senior-ranking policewomen in a gendered organisation that function to reproduce
dominant discourses as social power relations that intervene in the practices of women
and men in police. It may also provide understanding for what may be required to
transform and/or vanquish relations of power in order to effect meaningful long-term
organisational transformation.
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Keywords
New Zealand Police, Policewomen, Police administration, New Zealand, Police, Attitudes, Sex discrimination against women, Career development