With recent talks about removing the restrictions for allowing women on the front lines of combat, the question has been raised if this will weaken the military. We already allow women to serve as police and firefighters while meeting lower physical standards.
Have any studies shown a significant increase/decrease in performance when allowing in women who only meet the lower standards?
What is the rationale for allowing lower standards for women?
There are studies that demonstrate the benefits that female police officers bring to a force.
From Police Chief Magazine:
Women are consistently rated as trusted by their communities and, importantly, are motivated to serve communities in an era of decreased police legitimacy.2 Women have high levels of interpersonal communication skills, which translates into more effective practices in the field.3 Women are found to have a calming effect on male partners in high-stress and dangerous assignments, resulting in fewer police deaths.4 Higher levels of female representation are associated with organizations that emphasize community policing.5 Female police officers have a positive influence on the perceived job performance, trustworthiness, and fairness of a police agency, perhaps increasing the public’s willingness to cooperate in the production of positive public safety outcomes.6
Female officers are less likely to use force, use excessive force, or be named in a lawsuit than male officers.7 Research has found that male officers were more likely than female officers to be aggressive as a result of some quality of the encountered member of the public, such as race or socioeconomic class8 Even though studies show that subjects use the same amount of force against female officers as against male officers, and in some cases, more force, female officers are more successful in defusing violent or aggressive behavior.9
With this in mind, it should be clear that strategies that tend to increase the number of female police officers towards parity with male officers improve the performance of the force as a whole. And strategies that tend to prevent female officers from entering the force will tend to lower the performance.
By only allowing women who meet the same standard in running speed and endurance as men, you create an unbalanced force with few women and many men. These studies show that this has an overall negative effect on the effectiveness of the force.
1 Tim Prenzler and Georgina Sinclair, “The Status of Women Police Officers: An International Review,” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 41, no. 2 (June 2013): 115–131.2 Natalie Todak, “The Decision to Become a Police Officer in a Legitimacy Crisis,” Women and Criminal Justice 27, no. 4 (2017): 250–270.
3 W. Dwayne Orrick, Best Practices Guide: Recruitment, Retention, and Turnover of Law Enforcement Personnel (Alexandria, VA: Smaller Police Departments Technical Assistance Program, international Association of Chiefs of Police, 2008).
4 Christine Jacqueline Johns, Effects of Female Presence on Male Police Officers’ Shooting Behavior (master’s thesis, Michigan State University, 1976).
5 Todak, “The Decision to Become a Police Officer in a Legitimacy Crisis.”
6 Norma M. Riccucci, Gregg G. Van Ryzin, and Cecilia F. Lavena, “Representative Bureaucracy in Policing: Does It increase Perceived Legitimacy?” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 24, no. 3 (July 2014): 537–551.
7 Kim Lonsway et al., Hiring and Retaining More Women: The Advantages to Law Enforcement Agencies (National Center for Women & Policing, 2003); Amie Shuck and Cara Rabe-Hemp, “Citizen Complaints and Gender Diversity in Police Organisations,” Policing and Society 26, no. 8 (2016): 859–874.
8 Judith Greenwald, Aggression as a Component of Police-Citizen Transactions: Differences Between Male and Female Police Officers (PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1976).
9 Amie Shuck and Cara Rabe-Hemp, “Women Police: The Use of Force by and Against Female Officers,” Women & Criminal Justice 16, no. 4 (2005): 91–117.
