Gender representation and diversity in criminal justice scholarship

Culture, Race, and Ethnicity: Gender in Criminal Justice

Since the criminal justice field was founded in the 20th century, it has increasingly focused not only crime and what causes it but also on the ways in which crime is perceived, perpetuated and altered in perception over time. While women have played a pivotal role in advancing a variety of other disciplines, from literature to business management to psychology and so on, in the field of criminal justice there is a considerable skew towards male dominance of the discipline. For example, as Fahmy and Young (2017) show, more studies on criminal justice are published by men than by women—and women, when they do conduct research and publish academic papers in the field, most often publish with other men. In fact, their “increasing co-authorship has led some to claim that the intellectual contributions of females may be devalued, systematically putting them at a disadvantage for tenure and promotion decisions” (p. 285). If diversity of opinion and perspective is respected in the field of criminal justice, there should be more women publishing independently of men, but there are not. This raises the question of whether the criminal justice field is prejudiced towards men in the same way the oil industry has been shown to be a male-dominated industry.
Disch and Hawkesworth (2016) examine how “representations picture women and who speaks for them, and how acts of representation work to constitute that for which they purport merely to stand” in their application of feminist theory to real world examples of women and the workforce. In the realm of criminal justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan represented three prominent women in the field of criminal justice as they sit on the Supreme Court of Justices. Yet they are outnumbered (2-1) in fact by male Justices, which indicates that Fahmy and Young (2017) are correct in their assessment of the seeming sense that women must be dependent upon men in the field of criminal justice.

To better represent the perspective of women in criminal justice, it is not enough the women investigators, lawyers, judges, researchers, academics and law enforcement officers be represented on television shows and in films. They also have to be represented in the real world and they should be encouraged to publish on their own and offer a unique perspective that is independent of and not necessarily informed by the male perspective. In order to achieve true diversity in the criminal justice field, professionals within criminal justice must begin acknowledging the contribution that women can make to the field and to the discipline, whether via their research and publications or through their work in the courts or in law enforcement agencies across the nation.

Representation is the first step towards true diversity and as Disch and Hawkesworth (2016) indicate, representation has to be substantial or else the minority will always be marginalized and their inputs and perspectives will never be welcomed into the mainstream or accepted as valid in and of themselves. In order for women to be valued and respected in the field of criminal justice, the field should take better care to show more consideration to women and encourage them to publish on their own or in tandem with one another.