Abstract
State efforts to improve women’s access to justice often depend on women frontline workers who are themselves marginalized within the very institutions meant to protect them. We examine this tension in India, one of the world’s most gender unequal countries, and focus on policing, one of the state’s most male-dominated public institutions and one long seen as unwelcoming to women both as officers and as complainants. We partner directly with the Punjab Police to study the Punjab Police Mahila Mittar (PPMM) program, which assigns female constables to help desks serving survivors of gender-based violence. Although the PPMM program aims to make policing more responsive to women, the constables who staff these desks often remain professionally and socially marginalized within a force that is 90% male. We use a large-scale RCT across all 384 police stations in Punjab to test whether different training modalities - targeting women alone, women and men separately, or women and men jointly - can improve women constables’ standing within the station, strengthen their job satisfaction and sense of inclusion, and shift the attitudes and practices of their male peers.