American policing has a leadership problem. Not a competence problem, nor a shortage of qualified candidates. The problem is structural: the institutions responsible for public safety in the United States remain overwhelmingly led by men, in a country where women have served in sworn law enforcement positions for more than a century.
This is not a natural outcome. It is an organizational one. And it has consequences.
A nationally representative study by John A. Shjarback and Natalie Todak (2019), published in Police Quarterly, offers one of the most systematic examinations to date of female representation in supervisory and management positions across American law enforcement agencies. Their findings are striking not so much for their novelty as for the precision with which they document a pattern that reform-minded researchers and practitioners have long observed: women advance into leadership at rates far below their representation in the sworn workforce, and the organizations that do better share identifiable structural characteristics.
Understanding what drives this disparity, and what it costs, requires moving beyond the usual framing. The question is not simply whether policing is "fair" to individual women. The question is whether organizational arrangements in American law enforcement are structurally equipped to serve the communities they police.
Why Are Women Underrepresented in Police Leadership?
Women have been part of American policing since the early twentieth century, when Lola Baldwin was appointed as a public safety officer in Portland, Oregon in 1905. Full integration into patrol functions took until the 1970s, following federal civil rights legislation that prohibited sex discrimination in employment. Despite that legal protection, female representation in policing has grown slowly and unevenly.
Nationally, women represent approximately 12 to 13 percent of sworn law enforcement officers. That proportion drops significantly as rank increases. Female officers are underrepresented in every tier of the supervisory hierarchy, and the gap widens at higher levels of command.
The historical explanations for this pattern are well-documented in organizational sociology and criminological research: an occupational culture built around masculine norms of physicality, authority, and stoicism; informal networks that facilitate male advancement and exclude women; assignment patterns that limit female officers' exposure to the operational roles that feed into promotional tracks; and institutional resistance to acknowledging that gender inequality in policing is structural rather than individual.
What Shjarback and Todak (2019) add is systematic empirical evidence about which organizational features are associated with better or worse outcomes for female representation in leadership. Their focus is not on individual careers but on agency-level data, which allows for a different and more tractable kind of analysis.
Key Findings from the Study
Drawing on the Bureau of Justice Statistics' Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, one of the most comprehensive sources of national law enforcement data, Shjarback and Todak (2019) examined female representation across agencies of varying size, type, and organizational orientation.
In their national sample, women held approximately 9.7 percent of supervisory positions and 7.7 percent of management positions. Female chief executive officers represented roughly 3 to 4 percent of agencies surveyed.
These figures matter in context. Women hold roughly 12 percent of sworn officer positions nationally. The compression at the top of the hierarchy indicates that the underrepresentation is not simply a pipeline problem rooted in initial hiring. Women enter policing at low but not negligible rates; they advance to leadership at rates significantly lower still.
Agency Size and the Structure of Opportunity
One of the study's most consistent findings is the relationship between agency size and female representation in leadership. Larger agencies tend to show higher rates of female representation in both supervisory and management positions.
This pattern aligns with findings in organizational sociology more broadly. Larger organizations tend to have more formalized promotion processes, more visible accountability mechanisms, and greater resources for professional development. Informal gatekeeping operates differently when decisions must be documented and defended. Transparency tends to mitigate the worst effects of bias, though it does not eliminate them.
Smaller agencies present compounded barriers. Promotional pools are narrower, meaning a single supervisor's preferences can determine whether women advance at all. Informal norms are harder to challenge without institutional infrastructure. Accountability for discriminatory outcomes is weaker, and the social cost of challenging unfair practices falls more heavily on the individual officer.
Community Policing and Female Leadership
Perhaps the study's most consequential finding for policy involves the relationship between community policing orientation and female representation in leadership. Agencies that had adopted community policing programs or philosophies showed consistently higher rates of female representation in supervisory and management positions, a finding that holds after controlling for agency size and other organizational characteristics.
The explanation Shjarback and Todak (2019) offer is conceptually important. Community policing, with its emphasis on interpersonal skills, problem-solving, and sustained neighborhood relationships, creates organizational space for leadership styles and competencies that are less tightly bound to conventional masculine police identity. In institutions where communication, collaboration, and community trust are operationally valued, women are better positioned to demonstrate and be recognized for leadership capacity.
This is not simply an argument about gender stereotypes, though those matter. It is an argument about how organizational missions shape the criteria by which leadership potential is identified and rewarded.
Regional Differences Across the United States
Shjarback and Todak (2019) also found meaningful regional variation in female representation. Agencies in the Northeast tended to show higher representation than those in other regions, while Southern agencies showed lower rates of female presence in supervisory and management roles.
These patterns likely reflect a combination of factors: regional variation in political culture and attitudes toward gender equality, differences in state-level civil rights enforcement, historical patterns in law enforcement professionalization, and variation in the degree to which agencies have been subject to external accountability pressures.
Regional variation is a reminder that national aggregate statistics, while important, can obscure significant local heterogeneity. The conditions producing low female representation in law enforcement leadership are not uniform, which means the interventions required are not uniform either.
Organizational Barriers Facing Women in Policing
The statistical patterns Shjarback and Todak (2019) document reflect deeper institutional realities that have been examined extensively in qualitative research on women in law enforcement.
Masculine occupational culture remains the most consistently documented barrier. Policing developed as a male-dominated occupation and retains cultural norms, informal rituals, and social practices that were built for and by men. Female officers frequently report having to prove themselves repeatedly in ways male colleagues do not, being excluded from the informal information networks important for career development, and facing persistent skepticism about their authority that limits their effectiveness in supervisory roles.
Promotion inequality is both a cause and an effect of underrepresentation. Female officers are less likely to seek promotion in organizations where they have little evidence that advancement is achievable or that leadership positions will be professionally sustainable once attained. Organizations with few women in leadership have less credible signals to offer that advancement is possible.
Assignment patterns affect career trajectories in ways that are not always visible as discrimination. Specialized units, high-visibility patrol assignments, and mentorship relationships with senior officers all shape promotional prospects. Female officers in many agencies are systematically less likely to be placed in the roles that build the operational portfolios associated with advancement.
Absence of mentorship compounds these barriers. In a profession where informal guidance from senior officers shapes career development, women's exclusion from male peer networks limits access to the kind of sponsorship that produces advancement. Formal mentorship programs exist in some agencies, but they remain the exception rather than the rule.
These are not complaints about individual misconduct. They are descriptions of institutional arrangements that produce predictable outcomes over time, and that research across multiple decades consistently documents.
Why Female Representation Matters in Criminal Justice
The case for female representation in police leadership has sometimes been made in terms of fairness alone. That case is correct but incomplete.
There is substantial empirical evidence that female officers handle certain types of calls differently from their male counterparts, and often more effectively. Research on responses to domestic violence situations has found that female officers are more likely to make arrests when appropriate, more likely to follow up with victims, and more likely to be perceived by victims as genuinely responsive. These differences have real consequences for public safety outcomes.
More broadly, research has documented that female officers tend to use force less frequently, generate fewer citizen complaints, and bring different tactical approaches to conflict than male officers in comparable situations. The research on these differences is not entirely uniform, and some findings remain contested, but the overall pattern is consistent enough to suggest that representation affects how organizations behave, not only how they appear.
At the leadership level, the effects operate through organizational culture. Leaders set norms, reward certain behaviors, and shape institutional responses to misconduct and accountability demands. Organizations with more diverse leadership teams tend to be more open to reform, more willing to acknowledge institutional failures, and better positioned to build the kind of legitimacy with communities that makes policing sustainable.
Police legitimacy is essential for effective law enforcement in a democratic society. Research consistently identifies legitimacy as a key predictor of voluntary compliance with law and public cooperation with police. Organizations whose leadership reflects the communities they police are better positioned to earn and sustain that legitimacy. This is not a peripheral concern; it is central to what policing is for.
Criminal Justice Reform and Institutional Change
Debates about criminal justice reform in the United States have, since at least 2014, focused heavily on accountability, use of force, and racial disparities in policing. The question of gender representation in police leadership has received considerably less public attention, but it is deeply connected to these broader reform debates.
Reform-oriented analysts have argued, with significant supporting evidence, that the culture of American policing is a central driver of the problems generating public concern: excessive force, lack of accountability, adversarial relationships with communities, and resistance to external oversight. If institutional culture is the problem, then organizational diversity, including gender diversity in leadership, becomes a reform strategy rather than merely an equity goal.
This is the connection that Shjarback and Todak's (2019) findings implicitly support. Agencies that adopt community policing orientations tend to show higher female representation in leadership. This relationship may work in either direction, or in both simultaneously: community policing may create conditions that support female advancement, and female leaders may be more likely to champion community policing approaches. The causal pathway is probably mutually reinforcing, which is precisely why it matters for institutional reform.
The practical implication is that gender diversity in leadership and organizational reform are not separate policy agendas competing for attention. They are related components of the same institutional transformation.
Critical Analysis: Representation Versus Structural Reform
Shjarback and Todak's (2019) study makes an important contribution to the literature on organizational correlates of gender equity in policing. But the findings raise questions that deserve honest acknowledgment.
The most significant concerns the distinction between symbolic representation and genuine structural change. Higher rates of women in leadership positions are meaningful and worth pursuing. But representation within a hierarchy is not the same as transformation of that hierarchy. Organizations can have female leaders who reproduce masculine institutional cultures as effectively as their male predecessors. Advancement to command rank does not automatically reconfigure promotion criteria, disciplinary cultures, or the distribution of organizational power.
The community policing finding, while suggestive, also warrants scrutiny. Community policing is itself a contested concept in criminological research. It has sometimes been implemented superficially, as a public relations orientation rather than a genuine reordering of departmental priorities. The relationship between community policing adoption and female representation in leadership may in some cases reflect organizational signaling about progressivism rather than deep cultural transformation.
There is also the question of intersectionality. The study examines female representation in aggregate terms. It does not disaggregate by race, which means its findings may obscure significant variation in outcomes for women of color in law enforcement. Research on women of color in policing consistently finds that they face compounded barriers rooted in the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. An adequate account of inequality in police leadership cannot treat "women" as a uniform analytical category.
None of this diminishes the study's contribution. It does suggest that female representation in leadership, while necessary, is not by itself sufficient as a reform goal. The harder question is whether the organizational conditions that produce higher representation are also the ones that produce better policing, more accountability, and stronger institutional legitimacy. Shjarback and Todak's (2019) findings offer grounds for cautious optimism. They do not offer grounds for complacency.
Final Thoughts
The underrepresentation of women in American police leadership is not an administrative footnote. It is an institutional feature of law enforcement organizations that reflects and reinforces broader patterns of structural inequality, limits organizational capacity for the kind of community-centered policing that research supports, and weakens the democratic accountability that policing in a constitutional republic requires.
Shjarback and Todak's (2019) research gives us better data on where the problem is most acute and which organizational arrangements are associated with better outcomes. Larger agencies, community policing-oriented departments, and agencies operating in political environments with stronger accountability norms do measurably better. That is not simply descriptive. For those working on reform, it is an agenda.
The deeper question their findings point toward is whether American law enforcement institutions have the will and the capacity to pursue the kinds of structural changes that would actually move these numbers. Formalizing promotion processes, building mentorship infrastructure, and reorienting departmental missions toward community partnership are meaningful steps.
Transformation, however, requires confronting the occupational culture that makes leadership advancement difficult for women in the first place. That is a harder project, and a slower one. But it is the project the evidence calls for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are women underrepresented in police leadership?
Women are underrepresented in police leadership primarily because of structural and cultural features of law enforcement organizations. These include masculine occupational norms that frame authority in gendered terms, informal promotion networks that systematically favor men, assignment patterns that limit female officers' access to career-building roles, and the absence of adequate mentorship infrastructure. These are institutional arrangements rather than individual preferences, and they produce predictable outcomes over time regardless of the intentions of any particular supervisor or administrator.
How does community policing affect female representation in law enforcement?
Research, including the Shjarback and Todak (2019) study, finds that agencies with community policing orientations tend to show higher rates of female representation in supervisory and management positions. Community policing philosophies emphasize interpersonal skills, problem-solving, and relationship-building alongside traditional enforcement functions. These priorities may create organizational space for leadership styles and competencies that are less tightly associated with masculine police identity, making it somewhat easier for female officers to be recognized and advanced within the institution.
What barriers do women face in advancing within law enforcement?
The principal barriers include masculine occupational culture that frames command authority in gendered terms, promotion processes that rely heavily on informal sponsorship and peer network access, assignment patterns that limit female officers' exposure to the operational roles most valued in promotion decisions, insufficient formal mentorship from senior officers, and in some agencies, explicit or implicit resistance to female command authority. These barriers tend to operate at the organizational level, shaping career trajectories in ways that aggregate data consistently reflect.
Why is female leadership important in policing?
Female leadership in policing matters on several grounds. Research indicates that female officers tend to use force less frequently, handle certain call types more effectively (domestic violence response, in particular), and generate fewer citizen complaints than male officers in comparable situations. At the command level, diverse leadership structures are associated with greater organizational openness to accountability reforms. Police legitimacy, which research consistently identifies as essential for effective and democratic law enforcement, is strengthened when communities perceive policing institutions as fair, representative, and responsive.
Fahad Bin Islam Khan is a Ph.D. student in Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). His research focuses on U.S. drug policy, criminal justice systems, comparative criminology, and institutional inequality within policing and criminal justice institutions.