This is the first book to offer a comprehensive and wide-ranging survey of women's role in policing, drawing both on the authors' original comparative research and on the questions, theories and findings raised by the existing literature. Within a global and historically sensitive framework, the book explores such themes as the gender dimension of policing, the representation of policewomen, the extent to which different national traditions diverge or converge, the strategies adopted by policewomen and their colleagues or organizations in order to address the particular problems and challenges that their roles raise.