Masculinity Contest Culture Under the Microscope: A Critical Analysis of Gender Relations Within Ontario Police Services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Even though traits associated with masculinity contest culture have always existed within policing forces, this phenomenon is understudied. Masculinity contest culture has four principal characteristics: 1) show no weakness; 2) always demonstrate strength and stamina; 3) put work first; and 4) dog-eat-dog competition. This project investigated how police officers in Ontario, Canada negotiate gender in an industry where any deviation from masculinity contest culture results in negative consequences for the officer. Masculinity contest culture exists to varying degrees in occupations that are predominantly controlled by male workers but policing and the military are the two occupations with the strongest affiliation. There is no leniency for police officers to deviate from masculinity contest culture, regardless of their gender.In this study, 23 police officers from five police organizations were interviewed. Each interview was based on 20 open-ended questions. The researcher analyzed two models of policing commonly practiced in North America from a gendered perspective: community policing and traditional policing. Community policing is referred to as “soft” policing. The duties of policing are so highly gendered that women are geared towards community policing whereas males are geared towards traditional policing. Males who engage in community policing are sometimes feminized by officers in traditional policing who do not consider this model to be real ii policing. This research demonstrates women in policing in Ontario continue to struggle to achieve parity with males because of masculinity contest culture. The findings demonstrate that masculinity contest culture could eventually be transformed from an observed phenomenon to a theoretical framework once testing is conducted on a larger scale. To reduce some of the toxic effects of this culture, the researcher recommends police officers should reorganize some of their off-duty time according to a caring masculinity framework, which is another understudied theoretical framework. This study contributes to the field by demonstrating the existence and effects of masculinity contest culture. It is hoped that it will provide a starting point for a closer analysis of masculinity contest culture by scholars and workers within the police services.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".