Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 17

The final major area covered in this book, Section IV, is women’s employment in the CLS. The three major types of employment opportunities in this system are work in prisons and jails, policing/law enforcement, and the courts (i.e., lawyers and judges). Section IV of this book examines historical and current issues for women employed as correctional officers (guards), police, and lawyers and judges. In all of these professions, women have faced considerable resistance to entering these jobs and receiving promotions. Women’s disadvantage in the workplace is a “more enduring feminist concern,” and this is disproportionately so in CLS professions given the sexist “assumptions about gender norms for women” (Rabe-Hemp & Miller, 2018, p. 231). This resistance was and is based primarily on the attitude that women are unsuitable for these jobs because working with male offenders requires “manly”/hyper-masculine men. “Before the 1970s, almost all criminal justice employees in the world were men” (Rabe-Hemp & Miller, 2018, p. 231). Title VII, a 1972 amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, proved crucial for women’s professional entrance into jobs in the criminal legal system. Unfortunately, women’s advancement in both numbers and rank has been slow. Despite current efforts by law schools and police departments to hire more women, the numbers of women in these occupations are still quite low, as are the number of women working in men’s penal institutions (the majority of incarceration facilities) and women becoming partners in private law firms. As reported later in this book, even today some women working in these fields (policing, prisons/jails, legal firms, and courts) still face some minor and major resistance, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, obstacles, and hostility from some male administrators, coworkers, and the public (Helfgott, Gunnison, Murtagh, & Navejar, 2018).