Exploring gender-neutrality of police integrity in Estonia

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there are gender differences in police integrity in Estonia.

The exploratory study is based on a police integrity survey – gender-neutral in nature – carried out in the Estonian Public Order Police. The study uses nonparametric methods to test whether male and female police officers are identical in their views and characterizes the differences in the sample (n=109).

Results show that male and female respondents differ in how they relate to police integrity, but the differences are situation specific, not general across scenarios or measures.

This is the first study of gender differences in police integrity in Estonia and one of the first explorations of gender differences in police integrity overall using an approach that includes a wider range of motives. As the Estonian police force has the highest proportion of women among European police services, the study explores gender differences in a unique police organization with a rare gender balance. The study compares variability across groups with the nonparametric Levene test for equality of variances – an approach that is not common in similar studies.