Police Culture and Gender: Revisiting the ‘Cult of Masculinity’

The ‘cult of masculinity’ has received much attention as a persistent and negative feature of police culture, with its impacts repeatedly being drawn upon to make sense of women’s lack of progression and representation within policing. This article argues that such analyses remain locked into overly simplistic and reductionist accounts of how women and men experience gender within policing. In revisiting the ‘cult of masculinity’, this article assesses its utility as an explanatory tool in the 21st century. It explores alternative expressions of gender through an appreciation of the ways in which the concept of ‘time’ is embedded in the cultural set of understandings and belief systems about what it means to be a police officer and to do policing. In so doing, it enables a transgression of existing conceptualizations of the gendered nature of policing and of police culture.