Beyond the badge: how senior policewomen resist, conform and redefine leadership norms

Purpose This article explores how senior policewomen in the United States and Australia navigate gendered organisational cultures in which masculine leadership norms remain dominant despite formal equality reforms. Using a feminist institutionalist lens, it examines how women pursue legitimacy and career progression through informal mentoring, sponsorship, assimilation and identity work. The article aims to show how these strategies may simultaneously resist and reproduce gendered power relations, revealing the limits of symbolic inclusion and the persistence of informal barriers to women's leadership in policing. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts a qualitative design based on 40 semi-structured interviews with senior and mid-level policewomen in the United States and Australia. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling to capture diverse leadership experiences across federal, state and local policing contexts. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Guided by feminist institutionalism, the analysis examined how informal power structures, gendered norms and identity-based negotiations shape women's leadership trajectories within policing organisations. Findings The findings show that women's leadership progression in policing is shaped by unequal access to informal mentoring and sponsorship, persistent pressure to conform to masculinised leadership norms and ongoing identity work. Participants described how informal networks influence visibility and promotion, while legitimacy often depends on displaying toughness, emotional restraint and command authority. Although women adopt strategic responses to gain acceptance and progress, these adaptations can also reproduce the gendered structures they seek to challenge. Overall, the study highlights the gap between formal diversity commitments and everyday organisational practices in policing. Research limitations/implications The study is based on qualitative interviews with 40 senior and mid-level policewomen in the United States and Australia; therefore, the findings are not statistically generalisable to all policing contexts. The focus on women's accounts also does not capture how male leaders or organisational decision-makers may interpret these dynamics. However, the study offers important theoretical insight into how informal power, gendered legitimacy and identity work shape leadership in male-dominated institutions. It also suggests the need for future comparative and intersectional research across ranks, agencies and national settings. Originality/value This article contributes to scholarship on gender, leadership and policing by showing how women's advancement is mediated through informal institutional dynamics rather than formal policy alone. Its originality lies in combining feminist institutionalism with empirical interview data from two national contexts to explain how leadership legitimacy is gendered and how women navigate that terrain strategically. The article extends debates on symbolic inclusion, identity work and institutional persistence by demonstrating that women's presence in leadership does not necessarily signal structural change. It also offers practical value by highlighting the need for reform that addresses informal power relations, not just representation.