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background

              For our particular study we wanted to find out whether or not police officers can be considered sexist.  We decided to do some research to see if anyone else had conducted a similar study.  To do this we went on Google and typed in a variety of things relating to our topic into the search engine to see the type of results we would get.  Unfortunately we did not get the answers we were looking for.  We came relatively close, but nothing to give us anything to expand on or to go off of.

            Many of the information we found was based on the opinions of bloggers and journalists that had no statistics to back them up.  Due to using the computers at North Olmsted High School for the majority of our research we were unable to access many of these opinion filled blogs to see if they contained a link or any type of use full information.  However, there was a study conducted at the University of Hawaii in 1999 that dealt with the idea of gender differences in driving.  The study was done by a student of Dr. Leon James.  Their study went more of off the differences in driving habits of men and women rather than on how police officers differ in dealing with women drivers opposed to men.  The study did help in that it gave us on insight on the fact that men and women do approach driving completely differently.  Men are naturally more aggressive drivers which makes them more likely to be pulled over.  We also stumbled upon a list of Speeding Ticket Facts from Damon Dallah’s Traffic Ticket Secrets.  One of those facts was that “More men than women receive speeding tickets.”  Although it does not provide reason as to why, it’s better than nothing. 

            We found this information by typing “are women more likely to get out of a speeding ticket than men?” into the Google search engine.  Originally we had just typed in “are police officers sexist?” and as I had stated before, the results that we were given were mainly links to personal blogs that were opinion based with no supporting statistics.  We tried to click on some of the links to see what information they could provide us but the North Olmsted High School filter did not allow us to explore these sites for the reason of “Personal Page”.    The filter in general became a little irritating when it came to trying to gather research because it made us limited to the types of information my group was able to access.  Granted we used Google as our sole search engine which means there IS a possibility that if we would have used a variety of them we may or may not have been able to find some more useful information.  We also tried a more general approach with “sexism with police officers” and we were once again not able to find any studies.  Even when specifically typing a prompt about studies being conducted on the topic we found nothing. 

            In conclusion, I think it’s pretty safe to say that no one has conducted a study quite like ours.  The topic of police officers being sexist is indeed a popular topic among people all over the internet but none of them seem to have statistical data that is able to support their opinions.  There is a chance a study has been done and it is not made it onto the internet or that we simply weren’t looking in the right places.  Never the less we were unable to find what we were looking for but I do feel that the information we were able to find will at least give us a little stepping stool to go off of for our study.