When Femininity Is Irrelevant: Gender Similarities and Racial Differences in Fatal and Nonfatal Police Violence in California, 2016–2021
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research finds racial disparities in the frequency and severity of police violence. Police violence research has not interrogated gender to the same effect. We build on theories of “gender irrelevance” to argue that violent incidents between police and civilians cannot be extricated from masculinity’s relevance. However, in contexts when police respond to women as violent, police render women’s femininity as irrelevant. Using 2016–2021 California URSUS data and supplementary archival examples, we examine gender and race across fatal and nonfatal police violence incidents. We find that women are no more or less likely to experience fatal relative to nonfatal police violence than men of the same racial group when accounting for police perceptions of civilians being armed. We also find racial differences in perceptions of weapons, with lower barriers for fatal violence against Black and Latinx civilians. When women are in high-conflict, violent situations, other statuses become hyper-present beyond women’s femininity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".