Women in Policing around the World

This book is a long-overdue global account of how policing is gendered where ever it occurs as known through the myriad of studies about women and policing since the 1970s. Garcia takes a bird's eye view of the facts on the ground, in addition to conducting original research, and shows that gender difference and gender stratification within police forces form the dominant themes in policing and gender across societies. By exploring the police subculture of institutionalized masculinity and its emanation across time and space, she provides a compelling explanation for why women are almost universally underrepresented in police forces, marginalized and rejected by other officers, and often relegated to gender-restricted duties. This is an important work that calls attention to a profession that exhibits more barriers to gender balance than most. Garcia asks police reformers to take seriously comprehensive policies that would achieve gender equity and provide pathways for women in policing through deliberate programs of recruitment, training, mentorship, and protection from sexual harassment. With less than one in ten police officers in the world being non-male on average, this book is a timely clarion call and a significant contribution to police studies Dr. Staci Strobl Professor, Criminal Justice, UW-Platteville Venessa Garcia has produced a remarkable book filling a vacuum in the current literature on women in policing by providing a panoramic account across five continents combining historic, cultural, geo-political and sociological analyses. With meticulous research unearthing previously uncharted details of the origins of women's entry into policing in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America combined with supporting contemporary statistics and enriched by personal interviews with former officers, this is a model of comparative analysis. The framing of the position of women in a wider context, enables a deeper understanding of the police occupational culture not only to explain the subordination of female officers but also providing the template for radical police reform. Dr. Jennifer Brown Visiting Professor at Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics and Political Science Women Policing across the Globe is a much needed and timely addition to police literature. Police profession is currently under severe assault, based on claims of racism and brutality however, police organizations across the globe also have a long history of discrimination and sexual harassment against its female employees. This book sheds a very bright light on the decades' long institutional injustices from the historical as well as sociological perspective up to 2020, where policewomen are still treated as inferior to their male counterparts. The way the author approaches the problem, from a global and comparative perspective, addressing issues of prescribed roles that, frequently, drive decisions about recruitment, training and promotions, is extremely compelling and creates a picture of a sisterhood in misery. It is a must read for scholars who focus on gender roles and discrimination, police culture and police ethics but, first and foremost, for all the law enforcement practitioners who aspire to change, in a transformational manner, police organizational cultures regardless of the size or geographic location of their departments. Dr. Maria (Maki) Haberfeld Professor of Police Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice