Lunch & Learn with Nirvikar Jassal

About the speaker: Nirvikar Jassal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center. His research focuses on gender, sexual violence, ethnic conflict, hate crime, and policing with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Asian Studies and Asian Survey. 

He completed his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020, and previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and for the New York City government. 

Abstract: Jassal and Sharon Barnhardt highlight the patterns of exclusion faced by women in law enforcement, and carry out an experiment to examine the consequences of occupational segregation. They demonstrate that female officers are tasked with specific cases, especially what are seen as ‘non-heinous’ gendered crimes such as dowry harassment, at the expense of other cases like murder or kidnapping. Using a novel video-based experimental design, Barnhardt and Jassal show that the disproportionate assignment of gendered crime is seen negatively by women in general, who perceive female officers as illegitimate in certain contexts. Shared identity is not always a route toward increased faith in public officials. They also suggest that without an equitable division of labor, a ‘representative bureaucracy' may not translate into an egalitarian institution because newly represented groups may simply be pushed toward specific tasks.