Elaine Gunnison - Women Leading Justice: Experiences and Insights

The womens movement and increasing social consciousness regarding gender disparity and discrimination has helped to make gains over the past several decades to reduce gender disparity for women in the workplace. However, gender discrimination and disparity continue to exist. Women continue to receive lower wages, and fewer opportunities for promotion and professional advancement and this is particularly true in male dominated professions such as criminal justice.

Building on original qualitative data, this book explores the experiences of female criminal justice professionals who have risen to the top of their professional ladders. The book includes first-hand narrative accounts of high ranking successful professional women working across a range of fields such as policing, courts, corrections, victim and restorative justice services and criminal justice research agencies in the United States and Canada. This book highlights the barriers that successful female criminal justice professionals have to overcome to obtain their positions, and identifies key themes that these women see as having allowed them to break through those barriers and to navigate their professional environments.

This book provides students interested in entering the criminal justice field and working professionals already in the field with knowledge about women who have risen through the ranks and up the professional ladder to break through the glass and the brass ceilings of their profession.

Elaine Gunnison is Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Criminal Justice, Seattle University, USA.

Jacqueline B. Helfgott is Professor and Director of the Crime & Justice Research Center in the Department of Criminal Justice, Seattle University, USA.

First published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2019 Elaine Gunnison and Jacqueline B. Helfgott

The right of Elaine Gunnison and Jacqueline B. Helfgott to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-22264-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-22265-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-40734-0 (ebk)

To my husband, my amazing young men, and my parents. E.G.

For my extraordinary daughter Zalia. J.B.H.

This book began on speaker phone on a stretch of Interstate-5 North somewhere between SeaTac Airport and Seattle. I (Helfgott) had been at a meeting at the Port of Seattle Police with Sue Rahr, Executive Director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission and member of President Barack Obamas task force on 21st Century Policing, and Chief Colleen Wilson who was at the time the Chief of the Port of Seattle Police. After the meeting, I called Elaine (Gunnison) and told her about how these two powerful women Rahr and Wilson, who had risen through the ranks in the male dominated profession of law enforcement during a time in history when women were a rarity conducted themselves in the meeting with elegant balance of authority and empathy, the ability to say what they wanted to say, to get their points across, to make things happen, and to do so with command and respect and precision in a room of mostly men. I said to Elaine, someone needs to write a book about these women. I wanted to know more about how Sue Rahr and other executive leaders in criminal justice rose to the top during this particular time in history to get to this place where they have changed the ways justice is done; their stories, their challenges, and successes; how they navigated the small stuff conducting themselves at meetings, dealing with everyday micro-aggressive slights, who they talked to when they went home at nightand the big stuff how they rose up the ranks in the male dominated field of criminal justice to become female leaders who have changed the culture of criminal justice from the inside out. I could hear the churning on the other end of the speaker phone. Elaine was on it, and shortly after, this project was launched.

Elaine and I have worked together for many years where we have been academic leaders in our department (Department Chair and Graduate Director) and the only female tenure track faculty. We have spent many hours in each others offices, on the phone, working on research projects together perseverating over our decisions about balancing home and work the constant mental space where we have to make choices about where to spend our time, and how to multitask to fit it all in to meet the demands of our work versus getting to our kids baseball and softball games, cleaning our houses, taking our cars in for oil changes, getting out to run or to the gym. In these moments, we have found ourselves wondering about and discussing all the ways that gender has potentially impacted us the invisible ways. The small things people have said to us or to our female colleagues; watching as men get public credit for saying the same thing we just said in meetings; times we have been called aggressive or emotional or passionate when we do our jobs and do them well; watching male colleagues who bully and harm be held up and respected as model leaders; witnessing situations where men who make decisions to spend time with their families neglecting their work are lauded for being precise and having good boundaries around their time while women who make mention of their children in the workplace are criticized for choosing their families over work; or trying to count on more than two hands the female criminal justice/criminology scholars who are held up as the geniuses of our discipline; wondering as our own laundry piles, who does the laundry of the men (and sometimes women) who have hundreds of publications within a relatively short time frame; and the gendered nature of social activities that create subtle and blatant natural divides in and outside of the workplace, like how the whiskey drinking and cigar smoking and poker playing and talking about sports and wives seems to bond men, while there seem to be few female bonding rituals, and all the rituals no matter how seemingly benign, create a gender divide in the workplace, even between people who genuinely like and respect each other with all sorts of invisible and visible implications. Elaine and I are extremely fortunate to have each other we have discovered that champagne and Thai food while working with our laptops back to back on a Google doc and helping each other talk and text through our everyday choices and challenges bond us, and we have partaken in the social rituals of our feminist male colleagues in attempts to bond all of us together. Though even in 2018, with the most feminist men among us, the gender divide feels like it is still with us and we actively seek to explore and examine how all of us, no matter what gender, can break free of the gender divide and the ways in which it creates small and large disparities in the workplace and in everyday life.