Russian Women Finding an Expanding Place in Police Ranks, New Study Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 14 – Women now form more than 15 percent of the personnel in Russian police, a level which, Olga Isupova of the Higher School of Economics says, reflects the fact that they are not now discriminated against in hiring and promotion in that sector and that the Russian police is thus not gender restricted.

            On the basis of focus groups and interviews with police in the cities of Vologda Oblast during 2017, Iusopova found that “women in law enforcement do not feel discrimination” and that they are able to advance by displaying or suppressing their feminism depending on the sector of the field they are working in (iq.hse.ru/news/218066672.html).

                According to the Moscow scholar, the share of women in police work in the cities of the Vologda Oblast varied from 18 to 19 percent to 28 percent, with women somewhat less represented in street patrol work and somewhat more represented in analysis, investigation, and youth departments.

            All of this has emerged in the last 25 years. Before the end of the Soviet Union, there were almost no women in police positions. But in the 1990s, both to make ends meet and because there was a severe shortage of men willing to enter this profession, Iusopova says, women entered this field.

            Despite what some might expect, Russian women generally have not had to suppress their feminine side to make careers in the police, the scholar argues; instead, their particular points of view have been recognized by police men and commanders as especially valuable in many aspects of this profession.