Gender Change and Constants. the Case of Swedish Police and Gender Equality Policy

The aim of this paper is to present the case of gender equality policy and politics within the Swedish Police Service. The main object is to investigate the relation between gender equality change and local gender formations and experiences. The paper provides an outline and a theoretically and empirically  informed discussion of specific organizational, historical and socio-demographic factors that are key in an understanding of gender and police work in Sweden, and putting this within a framework of political and policy development. Sweden is often portrayed as world-leading when it comes to issues of gender equality, and state policy has put forward ideals of equal opportunities in all areas of society. In this context the national police service is interesting, as a male-dominated, masculine, state organization where gender change is visible.

Ideals and discourse concerning gender as well as gender equality policy and gender equality projects have been a part of police organization since the 1980’s and the female-male ratio is slowly but constantly evening out. There has been a symbolic change and a statistic demographical change when it comes to women in policing. The issue put forward in this paper is the impact of these ongoing transformations in everyday police work. Rather than evaluating the gender equality regimes, this project investigates into the micro politics of changing gender regimes at the work place. The results show that change is undisputable but unevenly distributed in the organisation with regard to the gendered division of labour and gender symbolism and the grand narrative of gender equality is put under scrutiny. Further the author argues links between processes of professionalisation and academization of policing, as well as altering organizational ideals as pertinent in this process.