Police departments struggle with recruiting and retaining women in sworn law enforcement positions. This issue has a greater impact on state organizations than their county and municipal counterparts. This article reviews strategies to recruit and retain women officers in law enforcement agencies. It will be published with a collection of entries written by participants of NIJ’s Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science (LEADS) Scholars program. Each of the LEADS scholars represented in the digest have identified a problem relevant to their departments — from theft and traffic crashes to police recruitment and management practices — and examined the issue from an evidence-based perspective. In addition to surveying the scientific literature, some of the authors have proposed and implemented their own experimental trials to test hypotheses, gather data, and move closer to solutions.
