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The growing number of female bouncers in Britain’s nightclubs must mean women doing the job have a more calming influence than their male colleagues, right? Wrong, says new research by the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Female staff may well be helping to clean up the image of club security but that doesn’t make them any less likely than men to have to face a violent situation.

That’s one of the key findings of a study by OU criminology lecturer Dr Louise Westmarland and colleagues who sought out and interviewed 50 female bouncers as well as club owners, police officers and security bosses in a number of UK cities. It was part of  a project entitled ‘Women on the Door: Female Bouncers in the New Night-time Economy’.

“Many people believe that women security staff are by definition a calming, violence-diffusing element,” she says. “But they report that there’s usually no time for anyone to say ‘right, you’re the calming influence, can you sort this out’?”

Instead they tend to be expected by their male colleagues to sort out what Dr Westmarland and co-researchers describe as “girl trouble” – situations such as female fights, which are as regular and often as violent as their male equivalents.

“Women bouncers get sent to sort out trouble in the ladies’ toilets,” she added. “There are lots of fights there – which break out more often than in the gents’ because while men are in and out very quickly, women are in there longer, queuing, or touching up make-up. If a group of women want to pick on someone they will wait until they go to the toilet.”

And while some female bouncers are naturally skilled at calming situations – just as are some men – they’re just as likely to get caught up in violence. “The women we spoke to had, on average, been in just as many fights as male bouncers – and many even admitted ‘we’d rather fight a bloke than a woman’.”

The two-and-a-half-year study, funded by the ESRC, involved data gathering in cities including Manchester, Cardiff, Nottingham, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Bristol and various areas of London. The project, jointly headed by Professor Dick Hobbs from the London School of Economics, and working with Dr Kate O’Brien from the University of Kent, ties in with the cross Faculty’s International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) (with the Arts Faculty), which is also one of the areas of expertise of  Dr Deborah Talbot, another lecturer in criminology, into the so-called “night-time economy”. This is a phenomenon  which has developed in Britain over the last 15 years as evening businesses (including legitimate clubs and bars as well as illegal trades such as drug-trafficking and prostitution) have given towns and cities a wholly different night time image from that they promote during the day.

“As the night-time economy has flourished, so has the number of private security staff,” said Dr Westmarland. “This has led to greater regulation, with bouncers having to be licensed by the Security Industry Authority (SIA). The SIA, and the clubs – many of which are part of national chains - want their door staff to be seen less as people who stop you getting in and more as people who will look after you and help you have a good time. And it means it’s much more difficult for someone to become a bouncer if, say, they have a criminal record. The kudos of having a bouncer with, for instance, a reputation for having killed someone is being squeezed out.”