Online panel discussion: Breaking the code – Navigating gender, sexuality, and ethnocultural identities in public safety occupations

First responders and other public safety personnel (PSP) who are women, 2SLGBTQIA+, and/or ethnoculturally underrepresented do their jobs within established norms and expectations about what it means to be a police officer, a firefighter, a paramedic, a correctional officer. These norms are largely heteronormative and hypermasculine in orientation and create challenging occupational cultures for underrepresented PSP. Discriminatory practices around hiring and promotions, tokenism, sexual harassment, practices that disadvantage childbearing, and negative assumptions around ‘fitness for duty’ are just some of the ways PSP are impacted by occupational cultures that idealize hypermasculine ways of being as occupational standards.   

This discussion explored the ways that occupational stressors specific to gender and other intersectional identities are experienced by women, those who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+, and other underrepresented groups, and how these experiences might interact with or contribute to the known impacts of occupational stress and trauma experienced by public safety personnel.  

December 5, 2024.