Men allege sexual discrimination at Swedish police academy

Dozens of men have filed sexual discrimination complaints with Sweden's Equality Ombudsman (DO), after being denied admission to Sweden's National Police Academy.

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The ombudsman has received around 80 complaints from men alleging they weren't admitted to police training programmes because of their gender.

The complaints come on the heels of an initiative by the Centre for Justice (Centrum för rättvisa) examining suspicions that police academy recruiting efforts put male applicants at a disadvantage relative to female applicants.

According to the Centre, there may be "thousands" of cases of sexual discrimination.

In its analysis, the Centre found that, for several years in a row the police academies have admitted the same number of men as women, despite the fact that fewer than 40 percent of applicants were women and that they generally performed worse on the language and physical parts of admissions tests.

"Men have had a much more difficult time than women getting in to the final interviews and have therefore had a much harder time gaining a spot in the programmes," Clarence Crafoord, head of the Centre for Justice, said in a statement.

"There is much to suggest that illegal discrimination occurs widely when it comes to admission to National Police Academy."

The men want the ombudsman to look into whether or not it's legal to deny male applicants a spot to train to become a police officer in favour of female applicants, even if the men outperform women on entrance tests.

"If they don't have the right to make that choice, it's really wrong," Mats Hedin, who was denied a spot at a police education programme at Linné University, told TV4.