Sofia Amaral

Women in Policing

Sofia Amaral, in a project with Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, has investigated if and how women in policing teams affect the quality of service provision. Women are largely under-represented in policing yet recent evidence shows that the presence of women in teams improves productivity and promotes more gender-equitable norms. The researchers considered the role of women in first-response policing teams in cases of domestic violence by investigating the role women may play in reducing recidivism and legal attrition. They used a unique case-level data from over 600,000 records of calls of domestic violence that occurred between 2008 and 2016, matched with case-level information of the conditions of cases. For causal identification, they exploited the random placement of female officers by a block of the day to establish a causal relationship between first-response with a female officer in the team and those without.

Ms Amaral’s research interests are in Development Economics and Labour Economics (Crime). Her projects examine the causes of violence against women and what type of interventions are effective in preventing it.

Sofia Amaral is a Research Associate at the Center for Crime, Justice and Policing of the University of Birmingham. She was previously a Post-Doc at the Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of Essex. Ms Amaral has a PhD in Economics and an MSc in Development Economics from the University of Birmingham and a BSc in Economics from the University of Coimbra.