I think we all expected a degree of resistance upon entering the Force from our peers—however, the out-and-out bias and lack of support from many Senior NCOs was a shock.
—Female RCMP Officer
Anonymous Survey Respondent, 1986
*
It was not long before female Mounties learned the extent to which gendered attitudes operated within the RCMP. Many began to experience work environments that were often hostile to their presence. In the 1970s and 1980s, the strongest opposition to women in the RCMP came from non-commissioned officers (NCOs), the police force’s middle managers.[517] Not all NCOs supported the RCMP’s decision to open up its ranks to women. Many were opposed to any renegotiation of the masculine standards that were so foundational to the image of the RCMP, and they worked to ensure that masculinity remained the force’s dominant feature.
This group of Mounties used their rank and position of power to intimidate and marginalize the women of the RCMP. They relied on the organizational structure of the RCMP to informally regulate them and influence how they were received by their peers, commanding officers, and members of the public. They also employed a number of harassing techniques in an effort to force the women under their command to ask for a transfer or resign. Their ability to freely harass junior officers without consequences signalled to members of the rank-and-file that the practice of harassment was normative and acceptable behaviour within RCMP culture. It was a situation that the RCMP refused to recognize or address, despite warnings that female Mounties were experiencing significant resistance from NCOs in the field.
In the 1980s, the RCMP noticed that attrition rates amongst female Mounties were high, and they commissioned a number of studies to investigate the reasons. In 1986, S/Sgt. S.E. Stark, at the behest of his commanding officers in “E” Division (BC/Yukon), undertook one of the largest studies of female Mounties ever conducted to that date.[518] The Role of Female Constables in “E” Division was initiated to identify and address some of the significant problems encountered by female Mounties across the division. Information was gathered through a questionnaire that was distributed to a select sample of members of the RCMP. Two questionnaires were developed—one for constables and one for supervisors—that asked questions about a variety of issues that female Mounties experienced, including training, the public, general duty work, violence, Mountie wives, social isolation, physical capabilities, and adaptation to the work.[519]
Stark’s study was a significant document because it included direct quotes from the respondents who voluntarily and anonymously completed the survey. Their comments shed light on the gendered nature of RCMP culture ten years after women had joined the ranks. The comments made by supervisors were especially revealing. The study showed that NCOs often relied on conventional understandings of femininity in their assessments of female Mounties. According to one, “The Male member is physically more capable. Female members tend to be more of a social worker type, rather than enforcement minded. It is difficult for a woman to take charge of a situation involving men, unless of course it’s marriage.” Another commented, “Psychologically most women are not brought up to assume a position of authority, and their size, in most cases, does not exude the authority figure to the general public,”[520] revealing that physical prowess was still considered a necessary component of police work.
Several NCOs referred to the unsuitability of women to perform general police duties; 85 percent viewed women as less able than men to provide adequate backup in potentially violent or physical confrontations.[521] Further, 88 percent of supervisors responded that they preferred to send men to assist with calls involving physical confrontation.[522] The assignment of certain tasks to female police officers by their supervisors soon emerged as a gendered division of labour within the RCMP. On a practical level, it denied women the opportunity to gain self-confidence and experience dealing with potentially violent civilians. On the other hand, by assigning women to tasks considered to be within their capabilities, supervisors aggravated the perception that they were receiving preferential treatment.
The more favourable treatment the women received from some NCOs did not go unnoticed by male constables. One observed that “females are, in some cases, directed away from violent and unsavory duties such as bar fights, drunken and wild parties, and situations that may require brute strength and fighting abilities.” Another noted, “It is still habit to assign violent complaints to male members more frequently, or to ensure back-up more quickly if a female member is the first to receive the complaint.”[523] An NCO’s attitude frequently informed the attitudes of the men in the lower ranks, who soon adopted similar ideas about the physical limitations of women and their unsuitability for general-duty police work.
Some NCOs blamed the women themselves for fostering negative opinions about female members. According to one, “Most female members appear to have the opinion that they are something special and should not be required to perform the same duties as male members. This attitude often causes rifts in communication and subsequently a more difficult time for female members.”[524] His observations indicated that some women expected, and received, preferential treatment while working general duties. These views were echoed by female Mounties as well. Margaret Watson, who joined in 1977, recalled that some women used their femininity as a reason not to back up a fellow officer or to avoid physical confrontations. Watson was offended by these women, whose behaviour and expectations complicated the working lives of all female Mounties. She maintained that “if you take the same pay, you have to be prepared to get physical.”[525] Shelly Evans agreed, stating that women caused problems when they decided to “flirt and be some giddy little girl and leave all the dirty work to the boys.” She observed that male police officers understandably resented having to carry a woman during the course of a shift.[526] As a result, many male Mounties assumed that all female Mounties, not just some, could not adequately meet the physical demands required for general policing duties. This earlier generation of women feared “group blame”—when the actions of one female police officer resulted in the categorization of all women as unequal to the job—and continued to work to gain credibility from their male peers by distancing themselves from what were perceived as feminist or feminine demands.
Trish O’Brien worked for an NCO who took a more traditional approach toward her as a police officer. O’Brien was twenty-two years old when she was stationed in eastern Canada in 1975. She recalled that the men she worked with treated her “like gold” and that her trainer did not afford her preferential treatment. But her supervisor had difficulty adjusting to having a woman on his watch for the first time:
The boss struggled with it. He was the sergeant in charge and he was old school. And he was very reluctant about me out there. He was pushing for me, I was a little bit timid … I needed to get out there and get more impaired drivers. That was his thing … In one way he was a little protective, in another way he was pushing me to be more assertive and aggressive, and so on.[527]
O’Brien’s supervisor had a tough time reconciling masculine standards of policing with his own ideas of femininity. Although he felt protective of her, he nonetheless attempted to instill in O’Brien the importance of adopting what were considered masculine characteristics. He left little room for O’Brien to develop alternative responses to general duty work.
Supervisors in charge of policing regions where individuals patrolled vast expanses of geographical space were also concerned with women working general police duties. Mark Baker, who was stationed as a corporal at a highway patrol unit in the Yukon, recalled that he and three constables were expected to patrol 3,400 miles of highway, an area that covered twelve detachments. Although he did not feel it necessary to check on his men regularly when they were out on patrol for a week or more at a time, he did check on his first female member on a daily basis:
When I came into work in the morning I would check with Telecoms to see if they’d heard from her, and where she was and whether she’d [called] me for that morning yet, and when they last heard from her. If she went 10-7 [the Radio 10 code for “out of service”] to her residence at 11:30 at night and they hadn’t heard from her by 8:00 o’clock in the morning, then I’d check at noon again … Maybe [I] had a little less confidence in this person than I had in my male members, but I don’t think it was gender specific … She was not as assertive. I suppose that’s the best way I could put it.[528]
For Baker, working with his first female Mountie challenged him to come to terms with his understanding that women were vulnerable and in need of protection. His reluctance to trust in the effectiveness of the self-defence training techniques women were taught in Depot was a common response for an older generation of men trying to adjust to women working as general-duty police officers.
Since general duty work was highly visible to the Canadian public, it was one area where the image of Mounties as heroic crime fighters was more likely to be cultivated and reinforced. NCOs were the mediators of that image since commanding officers relied on them to assure the smooth running of the detachment, the cooperation of the public, and the effectiveness of the rank and file in the performance of their duties. NCOs were well positioned to either reinforce conventional relations of power between men and women or adapt to shifting understandings of masculine and feminine roles. Many chose the former course. They adhered to the paramilitary traditions of the RCMP in which lower-ranking police officers were trained not to question those in authority over them. It was this power structure that allowed NCOs to challenge the presence of women in the RCMP unimpeded.
NCOs who actively opposed the presence of female Mounties employed a number of strategies to justify their belief that women were unsuitable for policing. Many engaged in systematic harassment in an attempt to force a female member to resign or ask to be transferred. The experience of Shelly Evans illustrates the forms that the harassment often took. Evans was the first female Mountie to be posted to general duties at a small, five-member detachment in western Canada in the 1980s, where she encountered an NCO who “had a problem with women and made my life a living hell there for two years.” Evans described the work, her roommates, and her male colleagues as “fabulous” at this posting. It was not long, however, before she became the object of the NCO’s mentally and verbally abusive behaviour:
You’d work all night [and he’d] be phoning you first thing in the morning [asking] “Where’s this, where’s that, why wasn’t this written up? You put a claim in on my desk for overtime. I’m only giving you half.” Verbally tell you to do stuff and then shit all over your files. Demeaning. Abusive. Rescheduling you so that you’re working a month of nights. Stuff like that. Cancelling your leave. Very tormenting, very abusive.[529]
The situation with her NCO deteriorated to the point where Evans complained to the DSRR in her area, who offered to arrange for a transfer for her to another detachment. In response, Evans told the representative, “That’s exactly what they want. I’m the first female at this posting and I’m not leaving until my time is done. Because it will ruin it and set the stage for any other females coming in here. I’m not doing it.” Evans did tough it out for two more years before being transferred. She was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), “not from the situations I’ve been in, not the gore I’ve seen, the horrible situations, or anything like that.” Instead, her diagnosis was the result of the harassment she experienced from her NCO.[530]
Rather than advocating for Evans and working on her behalf, the DSRR’s solution to the problems being created by the NCO was to transfer her. Divisional representatives, although nominated and voted into their positions by the rank-and-file, were also NCOs and were often complicit in the systemic discrimination that the women faced. Although their rank was officially downplayed in an effort to project an image of advocacy for junior officers, some representatives hesitated, or even refused, to register a harassment complaint against a peer who held the same rank. The system of representation established in 1975 by Commissioner Maurice Nadon was failing the male and female police officers it was designed to serve. The failure of the DSRR system to adequately advocate on behalf of victims of abuse left them without recourse, contributing to the systemic nature of the problem. Indeed, Evans later learned that after she left the detachment, her former NCO transferred his abusive behaviour onto the male Aboriginal constable who was stationed there.[531] For this supervisor, anyone who was not a white, Anglo-Canadian male was a target for abuse. Harassment was an effective tool in removing unwanted members from under his command without consequences to his own career.
Mostly, the only alternatives for a female Mountie who was experiencing harassment in the 1970s and 1980s was to resign or request a transfer. In this way, the system disempowered the women who were often forced to choose between two undesirable alternatives. Receiving a transfer did not eliminate unfair treatment, however, and often it was just the beginning of further harassment. The RCMP’s culture was such that any female Mountie who reported harassment would be labelled a complainer, a reputation that would usually precede her to her next posting. It was one more way that the culture and organizational structure of the RCMP facilitated, rather than prevented, the harassment of female police officers.
Being labelled a complainer had serious consequences for female Mounties. The fear of retaliation meant that most women chose not to make a complaint. Shelly Evans described how one of her NCOs would get frustrated with her over the files she was working on, wanting her to process or conclude them quickly. Once, when she asked for more time to investigate, he vented his frustration toward her, saying, “Why can’t you be like the other female members in this detachment and just be happy you have a job?”[532] Researchers categorize this type of remark by a supervisor as a form of gender harassment, since it conveys “direct rejection of non-traditional women and their right to work in higher paying fields.”[533] When asked whether she complained about this NCO to senior officers, Evans commented, “You just rode it out, you wouldn’t make a complaint. There was just no way. It’s even dangerous to make complaints these days. It’s just something that you don’t do. There’s always retaliation. Always.”[534] Retaliation against female Mounties who lodged complaints was an indication of the extent of the power struggle that was taking place.
The fear of retaliation kept women in their place within the organization. Marianne Robson explained that a woman’s job or a future promotion could be in jeopardy if she complained. A woman who spoke up was “seen as a whiner and complainer” who could not tolerate working in a male-dominated environment. “So, you know, you’ve gotta be like the boys and go along with what the boys want. Oh, no. Complaining? Absolutely not,” observed Robson.[535] The threat of retaliation and labelling highlights the systemic nature of the problem since the women had, but did not utilize, the complaint process that was available to them. Few were willing to risk the consequences if their complaint was ignored or the offending supervisor was not held to account for his actions. Without options to help them resolve the tensions that harassment created, it is not surprising that so many women felt they were under siege in the workplace.
The career prospects of female Mounties were particularly dependent on the goodwill of their NCOs who assessed their job performance. Consequently, keeping an NCO happy became essential if future opportunities to work in specialized fields such as forensics or plainclothes investigative work were to be realized. The annual performance evaluation system was the measuring stick used by the RCMP to determine the future career of every police officer. While performance ratings measured individual capability, they also had the potential for abuse. If female Mounties challenged abusive treatment, if their supervisors did not like the idea of women in the RCMP, or if women refused sexual advances from NCOs, they received lower marks on their performance evaluations, rendering them less competitive for advancement.[536]
The RCMP’s performance evaluation system also influenced whether male police officers who witnessed a female Mountie being harassed spoke out about the abuse. They too were subject to retaliation by an unhappy NCO. Shelly Evans recalled that although she usually had the sympathy of her male peers, “They knew enough and they evaluated it enough to say, ‘I can’t step in and up for her, protect her, you know, show solidarity with her because then he’ll turn on me.’” The sympathy of male colleagues only went so far.[537] The performance evaluation system was a powerful tool that bought the silence of anyone who was thinking of exposing the behaviour of an abusive NCO.
The hiring of female Mounties was seen by many men in the RCMP as a politically correct initiative that was forced on the RCMP by the federal government in response to the demands being made by Canadian feminists. But employment equity policies were not just a political manoeuvre necessary to placate a vocal minority group. They were one way to ensure that the RCMP was more representative of the communities it policed.[538] The implementation of affirmative action policies was not a new practice in Canada. Similar programs dated back to World War II, when returning male war veterans were given preferential treatment for work in the public service as a gesture of gratitude by the Canadian government. Private industry also fired the women who had been working during the war to make room for returning servicemen. And when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau initiated a policy to increase the number of francophone Canadians in the federal public service, he established an affirmative action program that promoted biculturalism.[539]
Legal scholars credit affirmative action initiatives as the “best known systemic remedy” to discriminatory treatment within organizations.[540] The RCMP implemented affirmative action initiatives because it believed that the attrition rates for women would decline if women were offered opportunities for advancement in sections that had traditionally remained closed to them. But some of the RCMP’s commanding officers were still lukewarm to the policy. On June 25, 1986, D/Commr. T.S. Venner, in a memorandum to the commissioner, wrote:
We seem to be always trying to rationalize our Recruiting/deployment of Female members up against urgent Federal government Affirmative Action programmes aimed at the employment of more women in the Public Service, equal pay for work of equal value, increases in the number of women at senior management levels, etc. That is all well and good; these are laudable objectives. But we must not lose sight of the unique role of the RCMP within that government framework and the simple fact that because of the nature of police duties it may never be possible to move as fast or as far as it is for other departments. I think it is time we accepted that and defended it instead of hiding from and denying it.[541]
Venner’s frustration over the timely implementation of affirmative action policies revealed that the highest levels of the RCMP continued to view police work as a masculine endeavour. His reasoning that the “nature of police duties” and the “unique role” of the RCMP made for slow progress spoke volumes about the RCMP’s reluctance to fully integrate women into every aspect of police work.
Perhaps the deputy commissioner’s exasperation was because he was already aware that women were resigning from the RCMP at double the rate of male Mounties. Years later, a Solicitor General’s audit of the success rate of the RCMP’s employment equity program between 1974 and 1985 found that of the 617 women who joined the RCMP, 43 percent left compared to 24 percent of the 5,149 men who joined during the same period.[542] The RCMP’s affirmative action initiatives were effectively stalled by the time Venner was writing his memorandum. Although affirmative action created space for new opportunities for those women who stayed in the police force, harassment continued to disrupt the full integration of female Mounties. The RCMP remained focused on increasing the number of women being hired and on offering advancement opportunities to those who remained, rather than critically reviewing the structural processes that contributed to the steady stream of resignations.
Female RCMP officers resisted affirmative action policies, too, albeit for different reasons. Pam Osborne recalled that Commissioner Norman Inkster spoke to her troop at Depot in 1987, just before they graduated. The commissioner announced that female Mounties would be allowed to apply for positions as instructors at Depot for the first time in RCMP history. The positions were advertised within the RCMP as open only to women. It was a policy that was viewed as discriminatory toward male police officers and it was highly controversial within the police force at the time. Male members saw it as reverse discrimination. They were so incensed that a fund of more than seventeen thousand dollars was raised by members from across the country who sought a court injunction against the commissioner’s plan.[543] Osborne and her troopmates had heard about the controversy and challenged the commissioner regarding the new policy: “We said, basically, thank you for making our lives worse because you’ve just reiterated that women need special consideration” to get ahead. Osborne and her troopmates rightly believed that women should receive promotions based on their merit rather than their gender.[544] They failed to consider, however, that there were certain sections in the force at the time that remained closed to women no matter their seniority or merit. Further, the reality in the RCMP was that no matter how hard women worked or what their achievements were, they were still viewed as needing the assistance of men when it came to police work.
As women advanced up the chain of command within the RCMP, those who eventually received commissions often faced accusations of tokenism and preferential treatment. These women took exception to the argument that they were promoted because of their gender. Louise Ferguson, who eventually received a commission during her long career with the RCMP, commented:
I think it’s one of the worst things we can do to one another, that affirmative-action stuff. Because we deserve these kinds of jobs and if you still continue to look for women in roles, then you take away their ability to totally own each one of those achievements they’ve had. Even at this stage of the game, I work hard. There are people that, I know when I meet them, they believe I’m the token female … That bugs me because I don’t think that’s true. I worked really hard and I did good stuff, and still continue to do good stuff. I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but I’m totally qualified. I really resist pushing for employment equity and all of these things.[545]
For female Mounties, affirmative action was seen as a detriment because male police officers assumed that all women needed the initiatives to advance their careers. It was a critique that eliminated the agency of the women and minimized their achievements. Despite the successes of female Mounties, many men continued to view affirmative action as facilitating the promotion of unqualified women who were taking positions away from men. Affirmative action only reinforced arguments of difference rather than equality within police culture.
The slow implementation of employment equity policies in the 1970s and 1980s did little to help female Mounties in the field who were attempting to cope with the attitudes of their supervisors. Cherise Marchand’s example is a case in point. Marchand, a French Canadian who did not have the benefit of language training following her time at Depot, was the first woman posted to a mid-sized detachment in an English-speaking community in the late 1970s.[546] The first few years were difficult for Marchand, who had to learn English in addition to adjusting to her new community and police work. Marchand recalled being told even before she entered the detachment that the supervisor did not want a female Mountie, let alone a French Canadian, working for him. Marchand had difficulty writing reports in English but she did not receive training to relieve the administrative problems she was having. Instead, her supervisor “took the red pen and just circled things they didn’t like and shipped it back for me to rewrite it, without any guidance.”[547]
After eight months, Marchand’s NCO was transferred and a new supervisor arrived. He too harassed Marchand. She remembered that after a while, everything she did displeased him. If there was one page number missing from a report, he would telephone her at home to come back to the detachment to fix it. At the time, Marchand was working twelve-hour shifts. She remembered, “I’d get home at 7:00 [a.m.] … by the time I’d get to bed, probably 8:00, 8:30, well they’d call me at 9:00. Call me back to the office right there and then to put a page number when the other ones were numbered. I mean, if it was on the bottom right corner and it was on the top or something, that’s not where they wanted it.” She eventually learned that her supervisor was complaining about her work to commanding officers at subdivision headquarters. Her language barrier was being used to justify complaints about her inability to handle even the most routine police tasks. After four years of constant harassment, a male constable finally confided to Marchand, “You don’t deserve this and I won’t do anything to help them. But just so you know, they’re out there to get you.”[548] He was wary of retaliation from the NCO and the potential damage to his career if he advocated on her behalf.
Events suddenly took a fortuitous turn for Marchand just as she was on the verge of resigning. When investigators at subdivision headquarters required a French-speaking police officer to help them solve a major crime, Marchand was temporarily assigned to work on the investigation. According to Marchand, her NCO initially thought that officers at subdivision “would see that I was not worth anything and they would can me.” After a month’s time, however, she was still working on the file and there was no indication that her firing was imminent. The detachment NCO became impatient and wrote to commanding officers at subdivision, stating that Marchand should be fired. He claimed that she did not follow orders when he asked her to write traffic tickets. He insisted that she only wrote two tickets over an extended period of time, and since she was not much good for any other type of police work, she should lose her job.[549]
When officers at subdivision asked Marchand if the accusations about her work standards were true and whether she could disprove her NCO’s claims, she took action. Marchand returned to her detachment that weekend when the NCO was not in the office. She opened the detachment’s files and made copies of every single ticket she had issued since being assigned to traffic duties. When Marchand produced the photocopies of almost two hundred tickets the following Monday, the commanding officer at subdivision arranged for an immediate personnel interview for her. By Friday of that week she was transferred to another detachment. For Marchand, the transfer was a “lifesaver.”[550] Once again, however, the RCMP’s solution was to move the victim rather than discipline the offending supervisor. Further, the commanding officers only believed Marchand’s claims after she was able to prove that her NCO was lying. It was evidence of the strength of the paramilitary rank structure within the organization: the NCO did not suffer any consequences as a result of his behaviour toward Marchand and he remained at the detachment, where he continued to abuse junior police officers, male and female, for years afterward.
Abusive behaviour in the workplace included the use of verbal threats, focusing on negative aspects of work performance, setting up a person to fail, lying to an employee, manipulating or controlling an employee, making non-legitimate work requests, teasing, ridiculing, and name-calling, all of which are considered forms of harassment.[551] Based on this list, it is evident that Marchand was exposed to high levels of harassment. However, she was able to hang on and fight the pressure to resign. Today, she is still a member of the RCMP, a testament to her inner strength and determination to stick with the job under extremely adverse circumstances. She currently holds the rank of staff sergeant, an NCO.
Female Mounties had varying experiences in the workplace due to regional differences. Women stationed in small towns on the prairies often experienced a greater degree of discrimination and harassment than those who worked in larger urban centres. Cultural and social factors sometimes contributed to this treatment. For example, since the prairies were the site of the arrival of the first NWMP officers in 1874, the arrival of female Mounties disrupted the area’s pride in its historical connection to the police force, which was still viewed as an iconic institution responsible for the taming of the west.[552] Not only did smaller detachments have fewer women, but geographical space meant that the women were often separated by distance. Lorraine Gibson recognized these differences after she was transferred from a large urban area in British Columbia to a small detachment in Alberta. It was the first time she noticed that some female Mounties were not getting a lot of support. “I’d go to a call and they’d almost cling to me … Like they were very supportive, wanted to hang out with you. I never realized how spoiled we were” at the larger centre where greater numbers of female members were stationed.[553]
It is little wonder that some female Mounties felt that they were in the midst of a battle for survival. Other women were forced to contend with similar situations. For example, Allison Palmer, a member of Troop 17, recalled that one supervisor would not talk to her during the entire first six months she was posted at the detachment. Several years later, Palmer had the opportunity to ask her former NCO why he hadn’t spoken to her. He responded, “I couldn’t, because if I paid attention to you, the guys would have got upset.”[554] Although Palmer accepted his explanation, the refusal to speak to a junior female officer for extended periods of time illustrates the lengths some NCOs went to make female Mounties feel ostracized in the workplace. Palmer also worked with another supervisor who once questioned her about what she would do if she had to go to the bathroom while out on patrol. The implication was that since bathrooms were not always available in isolated locations, she would be unable to function while on duty. Palmer replied, “Squatter’s rights!” to make the point that she did not necessarily need a bathroom.[555] The fact that the question was asked at all illustrates how male officers assumed that female biology made them poor police officers.
Palmer also endured continuous name-calling from her supervisor at her second posting. He persisted in calling her “Grandma” because her hair was starting to turn grey, even though she was still in her early thirties. Although younger constables sometimes called her “Mom” because she was older than they were, the NCO’s demeaning tone of voice, his continuous name-calling, and the fact that he did not refer to male members who were greying as “Grandpa” adversely affected Palmer. Further, she felt that she could not complain about the harassment because her supervisor was friendly with the commanding officer. Palmer turned to the DSRR, whom she asked to advocate on her behalf and help resolve the situation. But nothing came of her meetings with the representative, who found his own efforts were blocked because the NCO “had too many connections.” She finally sought the advice of a psychologist, who helped her understand that the source of her stress was her supervisor’s attitude toward women in policing.[556]
Palmer was not alone at this posting; in all, there were ten members, male and female, who transferred out of this detachment because of the NCO’s harassment of junior police officers. It was an example of the power politics that enabled some supervisors to exert complete control over the men and women under their supervision. Further, commanding officers also worked to block complaints, probably in an effort to stem accusations about the failure of their own command. Since harassment was made possible by the hierarchical rank structure of the RCMP, few female Mounties expected the organization to defend or respect their workplace rights. Most of the women developed their own coping strategies to overcome the discrimination they were experiencing.
Supervisors’ gendered attitudes toward female police officers were common in other Canadian police departments, demonstrating that the association of masculinity with police work was widespread. Municipal police officer Liz Davies recalled that her staff sergeant was “bound and determined” to get her to resign. She remembered that the detachment “had a coffee room downstairs, the constables’ coffee room. The staff sergeant wouldn’t let me in it. At first, when I was first hired, that was okay. I’d go down there, have my lunch, have my coffee. Then he decided, that’s it, I wasn’t gonna go in there anymore … and I wasn’t allowed to cross the threshold. Eventually, he had to give in because the union found out about this and they said, ‘You know, you can’t do this sort of thing.’” Although the union officially intervened on her behalf, the staff sergeant found alternative ways to pressure Davies. She recalled, “It was disgraceful, what they would do to me. I don’t know how, to this day, if I wasn’t such a strong person, I wouldn’t have been able to put up with it.”[557]
The mayor of the city finally stepped in when he heard about the problems Davies was experiencing with her supervisor. He immediately took Davies over to his office, which was in the same building, and swore her in as a full-fledged constable after only five months of service, instead of waiting until the end of her six-month probationary period. Whether this mayor was an advocate for women’s rights or whether his concern for Davies was motivated by paternalism is unclear. Nevertheless, he chose to make a positive statement regarding women in policing in his municipality by intervening on Davies’s behalf in a very official and public way.
Of course, not all NCOs in the RCMP opposed the presence of women, and many adopted a paternalistic attitude toward those who were under their command. Several female Mounties recalled these men as very supportive and protective of them. Louise Ferguson’s first staff sergeant was “an old dyed-in-the-wool, wonderful guy” who called her into his office just before she went to work her first graveyard shift. She had just eight months of service and he was nervous about her working alone. At the time, members of the RCMP did not carry portable radios while on patrol, contributing to the NCO’s anxiety. He asked her if she was frightened. When she said “No!” he replied, “It scares the hell outta me!” He advised her not to be a hero and reminded her that “there isn’t a guy here that wouldn’t call for backup if they needed it. So don’t think you’re any different and don’t be afraid to call for some help if you need it. If you can’t get anybody else, you call me.”[558] His words gave Ferguson confidence as a police officer and she felt accepted as a member of the RCMP.
Marianne Robson also remembered her first NCO and her male peers as “very, very protective because they didn’t want me to get hurt … I can say that throughout my whole career.” Robson elaborated by saying that this was because “I kept my nose to the grindstone, I did what I was supposed to be doing, didn’t raise a big fuss … I just did my job and kept my nose clean. Didn’t try to raise any kind of issues.”[559] Robson’s comment, although a positive endorsement of the men she worked with, is revealing. She recognized that there was a professional cost for women who raised issues and questioned procedures. Her reluctance to create a “fuss” suggests that there was an unspoken understanding between her and her male colleagues that resulted in a more positive work experience for her, one that was paid for with her silence.
As women gained seniority in the RCMP, they eventually accessed NCO ranks. The first woman was promoted to the rank of corporal in 1981.[560] Shelly Evans was wary of her first female NCO because she did not have a “good reputation. The guys were always mumbling about her, this and that.” Ironically, when the female NCO heard that Evans was being assigned to her watch, “She didn’t want me either. She said, ‘I don’t want any more girls on my watch. One’s enough, and it’s me.’”[561] The response of both women to working with each other reveals the extent to which women sometimes adopted the gendered attitudes espoused by their male counterparts. But to their mutual surprise, their working relationship “just clicked.” Not only did Evans gain the trust and support of her female NCO, but she learned something about her own attitudes toward women in the RCMP. According to Evans:
Part of the reason why [the female NCO] had this bad reputation is because she wouldn’t put up with crap. And I realized, I thought, here it is late in my career … and I’ve just learned this lesson that I am part of the perpetuation of these stereotypes, not stereotypes, these labels. Oh, everybody says, “She’s a disaster as a corporal. Can’t believe she got the rank.” … [A]nd then you go there and you realize she’s a damn good NCO. She’s the first one to say, “I don’t really know all the aspects of the job, so if I don’t know something, then I’m gonna ask.” She was an excellent people person. She’s a manager. That’s what an NCO should be.[562]
Evans was surprised to learn the degree to which female Mounties bought into ideas about the abilities of women in the RCMP. Despite their initial wariness, Evans and her NCO became friends. They are still friends today.
*
For the most part, female Mounties were unprepared for the level of opposition that characterized their daily working lives. Male supervisors did not wait for the women to prove themselves as police officers but began to exert pressure on them as soon as they arrived at their postings. Their tactics suggest that their opposition had more to do with gendered beliefs about women in policing than with the abilities of women to do the work. Many NCOs did not hesitate to capitalize on the power differentials they enjoyed to oppose women in the RCMP, and they emerged as the chief conveyors of discrimination. The consistency between accounts of harassment suggests that a culture of masculinity, rather than women’s incompetency, was at the root of their difficulty in integrating. Nowhere was this more evident than when sexual harassment was used as a method of control.