Women Leading Justice

Experiences and Insights

Elaine Gunnison, Jacqueline B. Helfgott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315407326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The women's movement and increasing social consciousness regarding gender disparity and discrimination has helped to make gains over the past several decades to reduce gender disparity for women in the workplace. However, gender discrimination and disparity continue to exist. Women continue to receive lower wages, and fewer opportunities for promotion and professional advancement – and this is particularly true in male dominated professions such as criminal justice.

Building on original qualitative data, this book explores the experiences of female criminal justice professionals who have risen to the top of their professional ladders. The book includes first-hand narrative accounts of high ranking successful professional women working across a range of fields such as policing, courts, corrections, victim and restorative justice services and criminal justice research agencies in the United States and Canada. This book highlights the barriers that successful female criminal justice professionals have to overcome to obtain their positions, and identifies key themes that these women see as having allowed them to break through those barriers and to navigate their professional environments.

This book provides students interested in entering the criminal justice field – and working professionals already in the field – with knowledge about women who have risen through the ranks and up the professional ladder to break through the glass and the brass ceilings of their profession.

1

Introduction

Gender and employment

Introduction

Across the United States and globally, millions of women are working. In the United States alone, 72 million women 16 years of age and older are employed representing 57% of the total work force (U.S. Department of Labor, 2016; 2017). Some are working in jobs to make ends meet while others are carving out their own career paths and female students are more likely than male students to participate in the labor force (U.S. Department of Labor, 2018). It is not difficult to forget sometimes that it was not always this way – that women working was the “norm.” Reflect for a moment on the types of jobs that women may be employed in today or positions that they hold. What jobs and/or positions come to mind? Did positions in criminal justice make your list? Did CEO as a position make it on your list? Currently, 5.8% of women hold 29 CEO positions at Standard & Poor’s 500 companies (Catalyst, 2017). These female CEOs are running companies such as General Motors, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard (Catalyst, 2017). What about the positions women hold in criminal justice that came to mind? When you think of women working in criminal justice, are police chief or prison superintendent, or judge the positions you think of? If not, think about your own potential unconscious bias. Perhaps it is not first thinking of women as leaders in such roles or maybe it is due to the fact that you already knew the statistics – that women are unrepresented in such upper level positions. Why is that the case? There are many explanations that could be posited to explain this phenomenon including imbedded institutional mindsets that tend to hold that a woman could not do that job, a woman’s own mindset that she may not be capable of doing that job, a woman’s choice not to choose a particular career due to lifestyle concerns, or structural obstacles whereby a woman may not have access to the necessary networks or mentors needed to foster a rise to a top level position (Barsh & Yee, 2011).

It is possible that you may have heard of many of the common problems impacting women in the workforce today, and you may, unfortunately, have experienced them first-hand. The recent “Me Too” and “Times Up” movements led by women in the entertainment industry has put a spotlight on long-time practices of sexual harassment of women in the workplace that has been culturally and institutionally supported (Garber, 2018). The uncovering of sexual harassment and alleged abuse by well-known media icons such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey follows on the heels of earlier focus on others such as the Fox News veteran news anchor, Bill O’Reilly. It was reported that women, who both worked for O’Reilly or appeared on his show were experiencing various forms of sexual harassment from him such as unwelcome sexual comments and sexual advances (Steel & Schmidt, 2017a). In fact, Fox News paid out approximately $13 million to settle claims brought against O’Reilly by five women – one settlement was reached as far back as 2004 (Steel & Schmidt, 2017a). Throughout the years, O’Reilly vehemently denied the allegations (Steel & Schmidt, 2017a) and despite all the claims and settlements, Fox News continued to stand by him (Steel & Schmidt, 2017b). However, it was not until his conduct came to the attention of the public in 2016, the fact that over fifty advertisers began to boycott his show due to the allegations, and the pressure that various women’s groups began to put on Fox News in pushing for his resignation, did Fox News finally fire O’Reilly (Steel & Schmidt, 2017b). Fast forward to Bill Cosby who was convicted of three counts of sexual assault (Roig-Franzia, 2018) and Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused by dozens of actresses of sexual harassment, which occurred over several decades, and of paying off his victims to be silent (Kantor & Twohey, 2017), and was recently arrested on rape charges in 2018 (Mueller & Feuer, 2018).

Some might argue that this behavior, while not acceptable, is typical celebrity behavior. After all, during the Presidential campaign in 2016, a videotape recording surfaced involving now President Donald Trump making lewd comments about women in 2005 (Fahrenthold, 2016). However, this type of behavior is blatant and occurs in all types of work environments. In 2017, 113 sexual harassment cases were reported over a three-year period at various academic institutions affiliated with the University of California (Kopetman, 2017). Reports included allegations of sex toys being left in a workspace, a professor kissing and touching his students without consent, a male employee touching the breast of a co-worker, and love poems sent from a professor to a graduate student (Kopetman, 2017). The university meted out punishments ranging from demotions, suspensions, pay cuts, and termination (Kopetman, 2017).

Sexual harassment is not the only issue women face in the workforce. Women experience a range of issues including difficulty getting in the door in the first place, lower earnings, promoted through different channels than men who often are promoted through informal interactions, being viewed negatively for displaying competence, not getting credit when credit is due, not receiving second chances as male colleagues are, and being overlooked in the rise up the workplace ladder (Rivers & Barnett, 2016). In male dominated fields such as information technology, cultural barriers that devalue and disrespect women in the workplace can have the effect of contributing to voluntary turnover of women creating completely gendered occupations (Watkins et al., 2006). In many professions that have seen an increase in women, overt discrimination practices that existed twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, have been replaced by less overt practices such as the social exclusion of women from informal access to power within organizations and marginalization (Rabe-Hemp & Miller, 2018). In criminal justice, even though women have been steadily growing in number, rising through the promotional process can be particularly challenging for women (Morabito & Shelley, 2018).

This chapter provides an understanding of what is meant by the term “gender” and a general overview of the entry of women into the workforce in the U.S., an intersectional framework for examining the issues, and how the passage of various laws accelerated the entrance of women in the workplace. Additionally, the chapter will cover the challenges that women working in the U.S. typically face (e.g. discrimination, unequal pay, being assigned to gender-stereotypic tasks) and will include discussion of gender, race, sexual orientation and the intersectionality of these characteristics as they relate to these challenges. Finally, the role of women entering criminal justice professions and future trends for female employment in the criminal justice field will be discussed.

Gender and intersectionality

Before examining the role of women in the workplace, it is important to understand the critical concept of gender which will be discussed throughout the book. Psychologist and sexologist John Money and his colleagues were the first to draw a distinction between the concepts of sex and gender (Bullough, 2003; Muehlenhard & Peterson, 2011). In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist scholars made further distinctions between the concepts sex and gender (Daly 1997). Today, many scholars use the terms sex and gender interchangeably and definitions vary widely, although most who do use the term gender to refer to the cultural construction of identity and sex as related to biological sex difference (Muehlenhard & Peterson, 2011).

West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 127) define sex as “a determination made through the application of socially agreed-upon biological criteria for classifying males and females.” Using this definition, biological differences such as genitalia, chromosomes, or other physical features distinguish males and females. However, examining women issues only in the context of sex, or biological differences, was considered too simplistic by many feminist scholars, and they expressed concern that role of biology was too intertwined with the term sex (Daly, 1997). Due to the limited scope of the sex definition, more scholars began to utilize the term gender as a better method of distinguishing between males and females. As described by West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 129), gender is “not a set of traits, nor a variable, nor a role” but rather a product of social interactions. In other words, gender depends on social factors and interactions such as the role or position one has in society as well as the identity that he/she has formed. When reflecting on women in society, particularly as working professionals, it is critical to be cognizant of how gender shapes power dynamics in society and how sex and gender stereotypes influence social interactions and the ways in which women are situated within and advance in the workplace. For women employed in the workplace, their gender may play a role in their job in terms of what positions they are hired for, what tasks they are assigned in the job, and how they carry out their job duties (Blackstone, 2003). In fact, researchers have found that if one woman is a finalist for a job position with three other male finalists, her chance of being hired is 0% (Johnson, Hekman, & Chan, 2016). Thus, the ways in which gender impacts employment and workplace opportunities for women is of critical importance.

Apart from differentiating the role in terms of sex and gender, it is also important to recognize the role of intersectionality and how it relates to the experiences of women in the workplace. While feminists and scholars brought attention to the plight of women in all sectors of society in the 1970s, some criticized feminist perspectives claiming that such viewpoints did not represent all women (see Crenshaw, 1989). Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black feminist legal scholar, coined the term intersectionality in 1989. Crenshaw is of the generation of legal scholars who developed critical race theory and then challenged it in turn with feminism through critical sex/gender theory. Her insights were situated within the activist context of the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1955–1980 period. (Gordon, 2016). In 1989, Crenshaw critiqued the current feminist perspectives of the time, including conceptualizations of discrimination. She argued that all too often conceptualizations of discrimination or disadvantage are framed along a single category—the plight of how such impact women in general. However, these feminist perspectives and conceptualizations often represent the experiences of White women and African-American men leaving African-American women “erased” from such conceptualizations (Crenshaw, 1989). As Crenshaw (1989, p. 140) explained:

This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.

She further added that a focus on the dominant groups’ needs and experiences excludes the acknowledgment of other’s needs and experiences which do not reflect the entire group. Therefore, Crenshaw (1989) called for the examination of issues and needs using an intersection of race and gender framework and argued that, without such a perspective, historically marginalized groups in society (e.g. women of color), would be further disenfranchised by policies put into place that will likely not serve them or be beneficial to them.

Any examination of women in the workplace – especially in the criminal justice profession where power, authority, due process, and justice are centrally embedded in the goals, structure, and function of the working environments – must take into account intersectionality, human diversity, and inequality. Intersectionality has developed today beyond the ideas of the 1960s and 1970s, rejecting universalist 1970s feminist claims that did not sufficiently bring together blacks, Latina/os, feminists, lesbians, gays, transgender people and anyone identifying as queer. Today intersectionality calls for the recognition and respect of a broad array of causes and identities with the understanding that all women are not alike and that subordinated groups will not accept the suppression of their identities, interests, and priorities (Gordon, 2016). The recognition that there are compounding layers of subordination that differentially effect both the individuals served by criminal justice agencies and individuals who work in professional roles within these agencies is critical to understanding the range of experiences of women in the workplace with recognition that being a woman in the workplace is not a singular experience and that race, ethnicity, and sexual identity add layers and levels of complexity.

Women in the workforce

Throughout the centuries, the role of women working outside the home has been limited. Historically, customs and stereotypes have dictated that a woman’s chief responsibility was working on tasks that benefited her family. There are a few exceptions, however, as in some countries, such as Africa and Asia, where women have consistently worked outside the home as street vendors, or “hawkers” (Recio & Gomez, 2013). During the Industrial Revolution in Britain and in the United States from 1760 to 1840, women broke into employment outside the home as manufacturers needed a large supply of cheap workers and women became the solution to their labor shortages (Kessler-Harris, 2003). However, the need for women to work in manufacturing plants did not outweigh the social convention of the time about a woman’s role in society, hence, their entry into employment was often met with societal criticism. In order to garner support from society for the notion that women should work outside the home, supporters, such as Alexander Hamilton, proselytized that employing otherwise “idle” women was beneficial to society – especially since if they worked in manufacturing it would allow men to continue to work in agricultural areas (Kessler-Harris, 2003). The manufacturers also tried to garner support for their wanting to hire woman by appealing to their families. For instance, a mill manufacturer would offer room and board, for a cost of course, and provide oversight of the woman to ensure her morality remain intact, or appeal to her parents by stating that her working in a disciplined environment would make her a better wife or mother in the future (Kessler-Harris, 2003). With supporters of female employment in society, manufacturers’ deals and appeals, and the personal satisfaction that many women felt earning their own money, many women in the United States and Br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Gender and employment
• 2. Gathering perspectives: Method
• 3. Female leaders in policing
• 4. Female leaders in the courts
• 5. Female leaders in corrections
• 6. Female leaders in victim and restorative justice services
• 7. Female leaders in criminal justice in academia and research
• 8. Conclusion: Directions for future female criminal justice leaders
• Index