Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Key Takeaways
- Macro (National Level): Women are recruited in strong numbers but sharply under-represented at Sergeant and Inspector ranks, showing attrition happens early in supervisory leadership.
- Meso (Organizational Level): HR data reveal women face fewer promotion events, transfers, and leadership opportunities while taking the majority of care-related leave, creating barriers to advancement.
- Micro (Day-to-Day): Women juggle heavy workloads, emotional labor, penalized flexibility, and discouragement from applying, slowly eroding confidence and career momentum.
- Why It Matters: These intersecting barriers form the police progression paradox: the qualities that make women effective officers are undervalued, middle ranks remain a bottleneck, and leadership diversity suffers.
“Maybe next time.”
Sarah has been a cop for twelve years.
She’s respected on her team. Victims trust her. Junior officers call her before they call anyone else. She’s known for being calm, empathetic, and patient especially with victims. She listens when others rush. She de-escalates when situations are tense. She’s the officer supervisors put on sensitive calls because she’s good with people.
She’s exactly the kind of officer police departments say they want more of and exactly why agencies work so hard to recruit women into policing in the first place.
So, when the Sergeant promotion list comes out, she expects (at the very least) to be competitive.
She isn’t on it.
Again.
A colleague pulls her aside afterward and tries to be kind.
“Don’t take it personally,” he says. “You’re great where you are.”
Sarah’s story isn’t unusual. Researchers now call this the police progression paradox. Departments invest heavily in recruiting women with traits like empathy and communication and celebrate breakthroughs at the top. Yet in the middle ranks, women are often left behind. The very traits that make them effective officers can count against them when promotions favor confidence, emotional restraint, and “fitting in with the lads.”
The Study: Looking Beyond the Numbers
The article “The ‘police progression paradox’? Why are women under-represented across the middle ranks of the police?” by Louis Bailey, Nathan Birdsall, Joanne Hulley, and Sarah Kingston takes a hard look at where women are falling out of the policing hierarchy and why.
What makes this study especially credible is its multi-layered approach:
- Macro level: National workforce data on 142,505 police officers across England and Wales
- Meso level: Detailed HR data from one constabulary covering 3,321 officers
- Micro level: In-depth interviews with nine women officers (Sergeants and Inspectors)
The study asks: What happens in the middle that slows women’s progression? Using complexity theory, it examines how individual experiences, organizational practices, and national systems interact to create barriers.
The Findings: Barriers at Every Level
The study organizes barriers into three interconnected levels:
- Macro: National systems, policies, and norms
- Meso: Organizational culture, HR practices, and force-level decisions
- Micro: Day-to-day experiences, perceptions, and informal interactions
It’s also important to note that women’s experiences in policing aren’t all the same. Career progression can look very different depending on assignments, supervisors, life stage, and agency culture, which is why departments need to look at individual career paths rather than assume one shared experience. Looking at only one level gives an incomplete picture. Looking at all three reveals why the middle ranks are where women stall.
Macro Level: The Drop-Off
Globally, there’s been a major push to recruit more women into policing.
- England and Wales: 35% of new recruits are women
- Norway: 46% of new recruits
- Sweden: 34% of officers overall, 30% in leadership
- United States: only 13% of officers are women and just 3–4% hold top leadership roles
Women are recruited because research consistently shows they:
- Use force less often
- Receive fewer complaints
- Are perceived as more legitimate and compassionate
- Produce better outcomes for victims
What the macro level tells us:
Using national workforce data on 142,505 officers across England and Wales, the study confirms a statistically significant pattern:
- Women are over-represented at the Constable rank (36%)
- Women are under-represented at Sergeant, Inspector, Chief Inspector, and Superintendent (approx. 25%)
- The largest and sharpest drop occurs at Sergeant (26%)
- As rank increases, the gender gap narrows slightly
In other words, women don’t gradually disappear as ranks get higher. They fall off early, at the very point where supervisory leadership begins.
Importantly, national data alone can’t explain why this happens. One could possibly argue it’s a time lag like women simply haven’t been in the job long enough.
That explanation starts to fall apart when you look at the meso level.
Meso Level: What Organizational Data Reveals
To understand what’s happening inside forces, the researchers examined HR data from one constabulary with 3,321 officers.
- Care-related leave was taken almost exclusively by women (94%)
- Men were far more likely to experience:
- Promotion events
- Transfers to other forces
- Career mobility
- For every one promotion event involving a woman, there were two involving men
- The lowest promotion movement for women was from Constable to Sergeant
Women were statistically associated with career interruptions.
Men were statistically associated with career advancement.
This matters because promotion systems reward accumulated experiences, visibility, and uninterrupted progression even when policies appear gender neutral.
Example: Officer Emma
Emma wants to apply for Sergeant. She’s also a mother and in her household, like in many others, the bulk of the childcare falls on her.
The promotion process requires a massive portfolio, mandatory training, and months of preparation. Officially, she’s given one study day per month.
In reality, Emma studies at night—after daycare pickup, after dinner, after homework help, after bedtime routines, after packing lunches for the next morning.
Her male colleague studies too. But he’s also able to take on specialized assignments, additional trainings, and transfers that strengthen his portfolio. Opportunities Emma can’t realistically accept because they demand flexibility, overtime, and availability she doesn’t have.
The HR data shows this pattern clearly: women accumulate fewer promotion-linked events not because they’re less capable, but because the system rewards availability over ability.
So, when promotion boards later cite gaps in experience or preparedness, they’re evaluating outcomes produced by the organization itself.
Micro Level: What Women Experience Day to Day
At the micro level, the interviews reveal something important: women aren’t blocked by a single policy or moment. They’re worn down by compounding pressures that make promotion feel risky, exhausting, or simply unattainable.
Across forces and roles, four themes consistently emerged.
1. Chronic Overwork and Emotional Labor
Women described workloads that routinely exceeded what was sustainable.
One officer worked 60 hours of overtime in a single month. Another finished a 48-hour stretch and had just five hours off before returning. Several said the unspoken expectation was clear: the work will get done, no matter how long it takes.
But the burden wasn’t only operational.
Women also described taking on disproportionate emotional labor such as checking in on staff, managing morale, absorbing others’ stress. One officer explained that women are often socialized to care for others, and in policing that turns into being constantly available.
2. Penalized Flexibility
On paper, policing offers flexible and part-time work. In practice, that flexibility often comes with hidden costs.
Women described returning from maternity leave to find that “flexible” work meant:
- The same workload in fewer hours
- Fewer development and training opportunities
- Being treated as peripheral,“spare parts” rather than core team members
Supervisors were often reluctant to place part-time officers on key teams or specialized assignments, not because of performance, but concerns about availability and continuity.
As one officer described returning part-time after maternity leave:
“ … if you’re not there all the time and you’re not carrying the same workload as others I think you can kind of be seen as a spare part or not given the same opportunities because you’re not always here”
For some, the trade-off was so clear that they chose not to return part-time at all, despite needing flexibility, because they knew it would stall their progression.
In this way, flexibility is treated as an individual accommodation, not an organizational responsibility. Something to be managed around rather than supported.
3. Promotion as an Extra Burden
Applying for Sergeant or Inspector required extensive portfolio work, often done outside paid hours.
Women described:
- Struggling to prepare after returning from leave
- Falling behind on required trainings
- Having fewer chances to take on career-building assignments
Many prioritized victim care and getting the job done over networking or portfolio padding, choices that benefited the organization but hurt their progression.
In one case, a woman was discouraged from applying for Detective Inspector:
“I had a Detective Inspector tell me that the worst possible outcome was me applying and getting through.”
Months later, she was asked to act in the role anyway (without the rank or security) just in case she didn’t perform well. She described the experience as “frustrating” and “disempowering”.
4. The “Ideal Officer” and Double Standards
Perhaps the most pervasive barrier was cultural.
Women are actively recruited for being empathetic, communicative, and victim-focused. Yet promotion often favored a different archetype, an “ideal officer” defined as confident, emotionally restrained, able to “fit in with the lads,” and willing to downplay stress or vulnerability.
This creates a double bind. Women described being labeled:
- “Too nice”
- “Too emotional”
- “Not confident enough”
And yet, when they adopted a more assertive style, they were labeled aggressive or unlikable.
Another described the constant pressure to prove herself:
“I have to work twice as hard and I have to be twice as good as my male colleagues in order to succeed”
Across interviews, women described a pattern of experiences that eroded confidence and opportunity, including:
- Masking emotions to fit the “ideal officer” stereotype
- Experiencing assumptions that promotions were due to gender rather than merit
- Delaying advancement until children were older
- Feeling like an “anomaly” for balancing both family and rank
In privileging a narrow model of leadership, the system undervalues the very qualities that initially make women effective officers.
These findings suggest that valuing a narrow model of leadership can unintentionally overlook qualities that make officers effective, such as communication, empathy, and judgment. While each challenge may be manageable on its own, combined they can make career progression more difficult, highlighting how structural and cultural factors influence everyday experiences.
How Do We Fix It? Mind the Middle
These practices don’t just affect representation; they shape the leadership pipeline responsible for supervision quality, misconduct prevention, and investigative decision-making.
The evidence points to the middle ranks as the area where support matters most. Some approaches suggested by the study and reinforced by initiatives like 30×30 include:
- Track the right data: Rather than assuming why women do or do not promote, agencies should examine individual promotion histories: who was encouraged, who had access to acting roles, who took lateral assignments, and who was quietly screened out. The pattern only becomes visible when individual cases are viewed collectively. Audit promotion events, acting roles, specialist assignments, and career interruptions by rank to spot patterns.
- Align flexibility with opportunity: Part-time work and leave shouldn’t block access to development. Flexibility can be an organizational design issue, not an individual penalty.
- Expand the definition of leadership: Recognize communication, judgment, emotional intelligence, and victim-centered practices as operational assets.
- Provide early support: Mentorship and encouragement before officers reach the point of discouragement can sustain confidence.
- Communicate transparently: Clear criteria and data-driven decisions reduce tokenism perceptions and build legitimacy.
Agencies with more representative senior leadership already show better progression, showing that culture can change when attention is paid to the ranks where careers are made or delayed.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t about assuming women are struggling. It’s about recognizing that promotion systems can unintentionally advantage certain career paths over others and, unfortunately, women are disproportionately affected. The only way to know whether that’s happening in your agency is to examine individual progression data.
Support is needed in the middle, where careers are actually made or broken.
Until agencies address macro expectations, meso-level practices, and micro-level culture together, women will continue to be recruited for one set of traits and promoted for another.
And officers like Sarah and Emma will keep hearing the same thing:
“You’re great where you are.”
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