Women in Policing: Health, Justice, and Organisational Culture — A Wee Chat with Dr Dr Mahnoz Illias
Dr Dr Mahnoz Illias completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2025. Aye, she really is a double doctor 😎, originally earning a medical degree in Bangladesh, before completing an MSc in Global Mental Health at the University of Glasgow, supported by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. Her PhD research examined policing as a gendered organisation and the impact on the health and well-being of female police staff and officers in the UK. Here, I had a wee chat with her about her research and perspectives.
Awright Dr Dr Mahnoz?
Hello there Dr Perry Josef Gee Gibson.
What was your research topic about?
I looked at the gendered toll of policing on the health and well-being of female police officers in the UK.
Who were you working with for that?
I was working with my supervisors and the wider team that I engaged with. My primary supervisor was based at the School of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow, and my second supervisor was at the Adam Smith Business School.
It was quite an interdisciplinary project. I was based within these two schools, but a lot of the work I did was actually closer to the field of criminology rather than either public health or business/organisation studies.
Outside of the school, I worked closely with the Scottish Women’s Development Forum of Police Scotland. They’re a group who represent women within Police Scotland — all the women staff and officers. It’s a voluntary organisation because, although police forces keep saying they’re “trying their best to accommodate the welfare of their employees”, but claim they “do not have the funds” for formal support. So volunteers step forward to fill the gap. I also worked with broader groups like the Scottish Institute for Policing Research and the Academic Team of Police Scotland.
What was the connection with the Adam Smith Business School; I don’t immediately see the connection to the research area?
It was mainly about the organisation — the culture, structure, and norms, and how they impact health and well-being. Although in public health we do study this (and public health itself is very interdisciplinary), it’s mainly the people in “organisation studies” who study how organisations are functioning. They’re located at the business school, so that’s where the Adam Smith Business School comes into my research journey.
"Social support, especially workplace social support, plays a huge role in our lives, which we often overlook."
You were originally a medical doctor, then you did a Master’s in Global Mental Health. How was that perspective shift—looking at mental health not just as an individual matter, but as a large-scale policy question?
It was different. When we talk about health or mental health, what I’ve found is that people often think it has to be related to institutional medicine, or hospitals, or doctors dealing with it. But in our day-to-day life, we can see how each individual has a health experience that is much less formal. Our eating choices, our social interactions, our work environment—all of these impact our health.
We also share a lot of experience from the people around us, which impacts us both mentally and physically. Acknowledging this in the workplace is important — in the past, these issues were often presented as individual problems. But I believe we’re coming to recognise it as a shared responsibility. Every interaction—including this conversation—happens in a shared space. Both of us bring our accumulated knowledge and experiences to it.
I also feel that when we talk about health, we normally try to narrow it down to medical reports or such things, but there is something way beyond that. Health is not just a medical issue—it’s a social issue, it’s a justice issue. These things came up again and again in my research.
Taking the perspective that not everything can and should be medicalised?
Yes, when I finished medical school in Bangladesh, my idea about mental health was quite narrow. When I talked about mental health, I used to think it had to be something major—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or something that needs regular medication and to be dealt with on a regular basis.
Outside of that, our understanding from our education was that “depression is there”, and people just have to deal with it until they need medication. What I’ve come to understand is that mental health isn’t separate from physical health—they’re intertwined, happening at the same time. It’s not a separate entity; it’s part of who we are. That means we should be aware of it in our everyday lives, rather than just in crisis.
Was your research focused on Scotland, or did it explore the wider UK?
It was actually throughout the UK. However, as the project received half of its funding from the Scottish Institute for Policing Research—and I’m grateful to them and MRC UK for their support—I had more connection with organisations based in Scotland. But I did a mixed-method study. I had to analyse two large national cohorts of police officers, which covered information from all police officers and staff across the UK—it wasn’t confined to Scotland, and I did not confine my results to Scotland either.
When I did my primary data collection, most of the participants were from Scotland—probably two-thirds—and the rest were from across the UK.
In brief, what were the main findings of your thesis?
I would say the main findings were that the health and well-being of female police officers cannot be understood as a single piece of work. Rather, I would describe it as a puzzle. By doing research on all these different parts, I got a closer picture of the entire puzzle, but it’s still not solved. It was more like a mosaic, with pieces fitting into each other rather than isolated factors—the social aspect of health working one way, the mental health aspect another way, the physical aspect there. They’re all intertwined.
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All of these health and wellbeing issues—stemming from the cultural and structural issues—often, as I said earlier, we try to describe them as medical problems. But health is not just a medical problem. It is a justice issue as well. What facilities you’re getting within your organisation, what you’re given or not given, can be seen from a justice point of view. At the root of everything, there is actually organisational injustice, which is controlling how it impacts overall health.
Lastly, I found that social support, especially workplace social support, plays a huge role in our lives, which we often overlook.
These seem like interconnected problems. How much can be attributed to being a woman, versus just “being a polis1 is stressful”?
Every organisation or institution within a society, including families, is a reflection of the existing society itself. When I was talking to those police officers, one of my inclusion criteria was they would need to have at least ten years of experience working as a police officer—to reflect back on how the culture changed over time, how policies changed, how that impacted them.
All of them came into policing knowing there would be a certain level of operational stress. They knew what policing was—definitely there were some surprises like every other job, but gradually in day-to-day life, the relational aspects became more prominent.
There’s a scholar with a famous theory called “Gendered Organisations”—her name is Joan Acker. She explains it very nicely. She says that a “job” itself is an abstract idea; for its embodiment, you need a person to be there.
And that person, when they enter the role, they bring all of their gendered ideas about women with them—what they learned throughout their life about the limitations of women, what they can do, what they cannot do. They came with their perceptions and kept spreading those ideas. As society has changed, those ideas have also changed. But still, though we keep saying that men and women are equal in our society, that’s not quite the case. Policing remains a gendered organisation, and this has real impacts on the health and well-being of female police staff and officers.
"Health is not just a medical issue—it's a social issue, it's a justice issue."
Is it your impression that police in the UK have more of a “boys’ club” problem than other places? Or is it more in-line with the issues in wider society?
They definitely had their own boys’ club issues. They had cultures where women wouldn’t be invited to the informal parties or after-work gatherings, or they’d always assume that if you have children, you must need childcare.
Are there any articles folk could check out if they were interested?
I have two articles out so far, and two others are under review.
My meta-ethnographic review, which looked at the interplay between organisational injustice and the health and well-being of female police officers and staff across the globe, was published in BMC Public Health [1].
Another piece of work compared the impact of workplace social support on the mental health of parents, both men and women, published in the journal “Policing” [2].
[1] M. Illias, K. Riach, and E. Demou, ‘Understanding the interplay between organisational injustice and the health and wellbeing of female police officers: a meta-ethnography’, BMC Public Health, vol. 24, Sep. 2024, doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-20152-1.
[2] M. Illias et al., ‘Exploring gender differences in policing: the role of workplace social support on the mental health and wellbeing of parents in policing’, Policing, vol. 19, Jan. 2025, doi: 10.1093/police/paaf037.
Were there any technical tools in your work that you were using, and any frustrations with them?
Definitely. One of the datasets I was using was the “Airwave Health Monitoring Study”. Since it was quite sensitive, to access that data, I had to get access to a “safe haven”, or what they formally call a Trusted Research Environment. The operators had maintenance windows (thus, I couldn’t always access it when I needed to), and sometimes because it’s a big dataset hosted somewhere else, there were technical issues. Many days I was frustrated because you’re in the mood to analyse and then you cannot access the data.
When I began my PhD, I didn’t know how to code in R (a programming language for statistical analysis), but I needed to for its flexibility and the amount of data analysis I had to perform. Learning that was also a challenge. I used to freeze at the thought of having to engage in coding work—the word “coding” was very frightening. But after my analysis of the first database, I got quite confident, and it didn’t take me much time to do my second analysis.
Do you think you would have benefited from having access to more technical support?
I had people in my unit who I could reach out to, but in a PhD you can’t control which part of work you’re going to do at what time of day. If it was a friend, I could reach out anytime. But if it’s a colleague, it’s a formal relationship. As a new person within the unit, I was also hesitant to reach out to them. Whenever I had issues, I could reach out to people, but these were colleagues who had volunteered to help me—there weren’t any designated people you could always go to. Having someone like that would have definitely benefited me or people like me who have just started coding.
What was your experience navigating the research space in the UK as a Bangladeshi woman?
I didn’t face any issues particularly from a gender perspective. But compared to my MSc, I felt a bit isolated. I don’t know whether that was the nature of the PhD, or something was wrong with me, or I wasn’t ready—it was just after COVID as well, so people were quite isolated at that time. Maybe all those factors worked together.
I was still hanging out with my old friends outside that space, but compared to that, I did not have that many close friends within my own department. They were very lovely people, very cooperative, but somehow I didn’t have that connection with them.
But there was another space—the Scottish Institute for Policing Research—where I met a lot of people from different fields: criminology, cybersecurity, forensic backgrounds. I made good friends with them. I don’t know what the reason was behind this, but that’s how it was.
"Coming from Bangladesh, I expected the UK to be a 'utopia'... But when I looked beyond the surface, it was very shocking."
For any organisation in general—you’ve looked a lot into organisational structures. Is there any general advice you’d give to leaders or individuals about how to help manage the issues you’ve seen in your work?
One of the things was that Police Scotland is a single force, but in England they have around 43 forces. Across different stations or forces, they each were tackling different issues well, and others less well. But those were ad hoc initiatives, with success stories not being shared with each other.
I know there’s decentralisation of policing and those ideas in criminology, and there are certain reasons for that. But I felt they should have a common platform where they can share positive initiatives that are actually helping people deal with the issues they face in their day-to-day life.
If they can find a way to share those and adopt the effective programmes that are working for people, that would be really beneficial for the entire organisation or the entire police force across the UK.
You mentioned the PhD ended up being more about criminology. Could you briefly explain what you meant by that?
I would say it’s criminology because every time I was going to conferences and knowledge exchange programmes, I was mostly interacting with people from criminology or forensic psychology backgrounds. They’re the ones coming to work on what’s happening with policing, how policing can be better, rather than someone from a health background.
In that sense, I didn’t have much in common with other people in terms of background. But they were very welcoming, so it wasn’t an issue.
Also, a major portion of writing up my final thesis involved understanding the policing structure within the UK—what policies are out there, under what law police organisations in the UK came into being. Those are things more from criminology rather than my health perspective. They were new ideas for me.
Anything else you want to highlight?
Another interesting finding: when I started my project, I was initially expecting the focus to be about physical health. Many police officers are exposed to more danger than a typical office job, and if we’re talking about women—our physiology is generally different from men, and this has some impact on our musculoskeletal health. Perhaps my research would take me into questions around musculoskeletal problems they’re facing, and how the workplace could change to support that.
However, when I started to look into it, what came up more consistently was mental health issues. I was very surprised that no matter which part of the world the articles I was researching were coming from, they had similar issues: regardless of the culture—whether it was from the Global South or Global North. It was surprising for me because, coming from Bangladesh, I expected the UK to be a “utopia” where everything was perfect, or at least significantly better, women would be getting their rights properly, they didn’t have to fight for it, they were living their lives very comfortably.
But when I looked beyond the surface, it was very shocking and frustrating for me to deal with those accounts on a daily basis, and that these issues exist in the UK as much as they do in other parts of the world. It also helped me realise how seemingly gender-neutral policies are not as neutral as they seem.
Thank you Dr Dr Mahnoz
Thank you Dr Perry Josef Gee Gibson.
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“Polis” is a Scots term for police. ↩