The present study was designed to analyze gender stereotypes in U.S. print advertisements of police officers in a professional police magazine (n = 680). A decade (1996–2006) of advertisements was examined using E. Goffman's (Citation1979) framework for content/frame analysis. The results suggest that women (n = 99) are numerically underrepresented and socially excluded from the imagery of crime-fighting; rather, they are portrayed as being in lower ranks, stereotypically as caretakers and nurturers. The implications for women police, the citizens they serve, and the administrators who hire them are critical, as advertisements function as a feedback loop whereby notions of what a female officer is are represented, digested, and recreated.
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Rabe-Hemp et al. (2011) studied this question.
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