Female Police Officers in Pakistan: Diverse Realities, Continuities and Change

Pakistan’s police have historically displayed significant apathy towards recruiting women, considering them unsuitable for this profession

. The social stigma of working in a notorious, male-dominated organization has also prevented many women from joining in the past. Today, female police officers comprise just over 3% of the Pakistani police. This book is the first to examine their experiences within it. It draws on extensive ethnographic research on female police officers of all ranks in cities across Pakistan to illustrate the diversity of their recruitment, roles, experiences, and career prospects across rank, cadre, and region. It also demonstrates how female officers are combatting patriarchal challenges to make greater inroads into a masculine terrain, taking on diverse roles, and playing an increasingly important role in supporting women’s access to justice, and why these changes cannot be conflated with the idea that these will automatically and radically transform the organization itself.

Sadaf Ahmad is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan. She completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Syracuse University in the USA and is the author of Transforming Faith: A Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women.