Officer gender and traffic ticket decisions: Police blue or women too?

Abstract

Contradictory scholarly arguments and limited previous research currently compromise understanding of whether officer gender affects street-level police actions. This research probed those contradictions and added to the limited previous research by examining traffic ticket decisions by women and men Boston police during April and May of 2001. The multivariate story the data tell was one of no differences between women police and men police. If gender propels women and men police in different directions, as some scholars argue, then evidence of those differences simply was not visible when viewed through the lens of the present research.