Coping with Conundrums: Lower Ranked Pakistani Policewomen and Gender Inequity at the Workplace

Abstract

Scholarship on gender and policing has frequently applied gendered organizational theory to understand how this type of organization and the men who run it produce gendered difference and inequity at the workplace. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research on lower ranked policewomen in Pakistan and contend that to fully fathom women’s marginalization at work, an analysis must not limit itself to the organization or the men who create the inequity but must also focus on women’s workplace behavior. My research sheds light on women’s anxieties about working with a large number of men and about people questioning their morality and character because they do so. I also demonstrate how their subsequent coping strategies can impede their professional development and reproduce their marginalization at their workplace. This woman-centric approach, which examines how policewomen navigate gendered landscapes in different patriarchal social spaces, therefore shows that workplace inequity is the collective result of the interplay between different actors and social structures, and leads to a more complex understanding of this phenomenon.