STRATEGIES TO RECONCILE DOMESTIC AND PAID WORK DUTIES IN MEXICAN POLICE WOMEN: A STEPPING STONE TO GENDER EQUALITY?

Résumé 0

This study examines the experience of Mexican police women regarding their strategies for reconciling paid employment and family life from a gender perspective and explores some individual and structural experiences about work-life related preferences. Double presence, understood as the need to respond simultaneously to the demands of paid and domestic-family work, affects mostly women and may negatively affect their health, so it is important to analyze its different manifestations in working women whose jobs have prolonged and atypical work schedules such as police officers. Mixed (quantitative-qualitative) methods were used, so that first questionnaires were applied to police women and men with operative ranks and the same was done with women who had a command rank. After that,, women with both police ranks were interviewed in order to delve into some quantitative indicators related to gender inequalities in the division of labor. Results showed gender inequities in the way women and men arrange their work and family life. These inequalities result in individual informal conciliatory strategies that derive in an increases in women's workloads. The specificity of the police institution is discussed as well as the prevalence of the needs of police women in the way they make their choices for the reconciliation of family and employment. Finally, the importance of institutional policies that allow free choice in women is revealed.