To find out about the representation of women in the police force, objective data from EUROSTAT (2019) is used, which provides global data on men and women in police forces without making any reference to percentages disaggregated by categories or ranks. Women were not really accepted or integrated as police officers until a few decades ago, and it can be said that today not only are they still a minority, but their representation, especially in management positions, is much lower ( Natarajan, 2008 Cordner and Cordner, 2011 Barratt et al., 2014 Silvestri and Tong, 2020), although it is difficult to determine the number of women and their representativeness in different positions in European police organizations due to the lack of complete official statistics or other information resources ( Brown, 2000). The role of women in the police during the nineteenth century was essentially of an auxiliary nature, a kind of civilian who acted almost like a midwife in custody and support work in the search and custody of female suspects, or in administrative tasks of aid and support ( Martin, 1989 Appier, 1992 Schulz, 1993 Premier, 1998). What implications these results have on the strategies that police organizations should follow to achieve the challenge of inclusion are discussed, and new ways of analysis are proposed. According to the results, the mirage of equality, dominant in the view of male police officers, is a major barrier to achieving real equality, both horizontally and vertically. The results show a considerable gap between the perceptions of male and female police executive leaders with regard to access, career development and workplace conditions faced by policepersons. Data was collected through a questionnaire composed of 23 open questions. In this context, research was conducted based on a content analysis of the perceptions of 56 police officers, 28 men and 28 women with considerable police experience, occupying executive leadership positions from a total of 26 European countries. However, many areas remain closed to women within police organizations. As of today in Europe, despite the slow progress, the 25% barrier to female representation has already been overcome in several countries. The impediments and barriers that women face in entering and developing a police career have received relatively little attention from researchers.
3Spanish National Police, Palencia, Spain.2School of Management and Business, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia.1Department of Social Psychology and Anthropology, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain.
Concha Antón Rubio 1*, Merlin Patricia Grueso Hinestroza 2* and Montserrat Marín López 3
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