Danger coupled with hugely varied and demanding roles are the main attractions for policewomen serving in the frontline of a vital public service. In any troublespot you will find them shoulder to shoulder with male colleagues.

On the day we spoke, Inspector Danielle Corfield of West Midlands Police had been up at 3am executing a firearms warrant — smashing down a door and leading a team that arrested a suspected gunman. She says: “Luckily he wasn’t armed and he didn’t put up a fight. But then we had firearms officers as back-up. I still get a real buzz from my job, taking villains off the streets.” On most days, the stab-proof vest stays in the locker as Corfield directs operations from headquarters, managing 60 uniformed officers and staff in the division that covers Birchfield, Lozells and East Handsworth, a patch that contains some of the toughest inner-city crime in the UK.

Today the role of the police is a lot more nuanced than rounding up drug dealers and clamping down on gun and knife crime. Monthly public meetings build trust and make for safer streets. Corfield says: “We listen and consult with our communities more. We ask the public what are the issues that concern you most and we make them our priorities.”

Detective Superintendent Barbara Franklin of Northumbria Police had spent a day in court at the end of a 60-hour week. Despite long hours and being with the force for 27 years, she could not imagine a more satisfying job than leading murder investigations. says: “My proudest moment was in 2006, when I received the Queen’s Police Medal. I had cleared up seven murders in a year, including some particularly difficult gangland killings.”

Equal opportunities policies and a drive to recruit more women have boosted the numbers to about a third in both uniformed and detective branches. In some of the more progressive forces, women recruits are level pegging with men. Family-friendly policies, such as flexible working and job share, suit women police officers with young children.

Chief Superintendent Jane Horwood, the most senior policewoman in West Mercia Police, believes career development and mentoring is the way forward. The British Association for Women in Policing mentor of the year in 2008, Horwood says: “I encourage women to move out of their comfort zone. We’re getting more women in CID, traffic and armed response. We have a chief firearms instructor who’s a woman; she’s the only one in the country.”

Horwood’s own career took off when she was sent on a three-year secondment with the National Criminal Intelligence Service in London, a forerunner of today’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency. She says: “I was a field intelligence officer to start with, helping to analyse and direct intelligence on serious villains such as armed bank robbers, drugs cartels and money laundering.”

Corfield was similarly talent-spotted to work directly for the West Midlands chief constable and his command team. She has since enjoyed rapid promotion from 2006, when she qualified as a sergeant, to last year, when she passed her inspector exams.

Today being a woman is no bar to promotion to the highest ranks, but when Franklin joined the CID in the early 1980s, she recalls: “You were allowed to have only one woman on the squad. I was that woman — and I was expected to make the tea at the start of the shift.” Attitudes have changed radically: Franklin now mentors four junior female colleagues and is preparing them for promotion.

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