Force of change? Women’s representation in policing and officer use of force in citizen interactions
26 Mar 2026
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W2.01 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Behaviour seminar
Speaker: Jennifer Merluzzi, Associate Professor, Northwestern University
About the seminar topic
Efforts to increase women’s representation in law enforcement often assume that adding women officers will result in lower officer use-of-force rates and improve public trust. This logic rests on robust evidence that women officers, on average, use less force than men officers. Yet, this baseline overlooks how the behaviour of incumbent officers might change with shifts in the gender composition of a masculine occupation. Using 13 years of longitudinal data from the Chicago Police Department, including more than one million monthly observations of approximately 13,000 frontline officers, we examine how changes in the gender composition of a police district correspond with an individual officer’s use-of-force behaviour in citizen interactions. Integrating social identity theory with research on masculinity contest cultures and gendered status beliefs, we predict and find that as the proportion of women officers in a police district increases, a man officer propensity to use force increases. A positive but statistically insignificant pattern also emerges for a woman officer. These findings challenge the assumption that adding more women into law enforcement automatically reduces aggressive police response. Instead, we underscore the need for diversification goals to anticipate incumbent worker behaviour in occupations where workers strongly associate with the masculine identity of the work. We conclude with practical guidance for designing more effective policies to support gender integration in policing and other traditionally male-dominated occupations.
Speaker bio
Jennifer Merluzzi is an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Strategic Management and Public Policy at George Washington University School of Business. She specialises in research on labour market gender inequality across career outcomes, such as hiring, promotions, performance recognition and entrepreneurial funding. She is especially interested in questions related to how workers present their career identity to organisational evaluators and how this influences outcomes. Her research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, and Academy of Management Discoveries and has also been featured in Harvard Business Review and the New York Times. She also serves as a Senior Editor at Organization Science. Professor Merluzzi’s current projects include examining use-of-force rates among men and women officers in response to gender diversification in policing, how gender-typing of career backgrounds impact job offer compensation awarded to women, and exit rates from entrepreneurship by women founders of businesses in male-dominated industries.
Prior to academia, her professional background included roles in general management, where she ran a regional call-centre and managed supply chain warehouse operations at McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply Company, as well as in management consulting both at Keane Consulting Group and independently.
She graduated cum laude with honours from Tulane University’s Newcomb College with a BA in English and Sociology, has an MBA from the Olin School of Business at Washington University and received her PhD from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago in economic sociology.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.