Two decades of LEMAS surveys reveal slow progress adding women to state police forces across the US

This special issue on women in policing included this report by Helen H. Yu about trends in gender diversity in 49 primary state law enforcement agencies in the US, from 2000 to 2020. She used data from six Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) surveys, which she accessed via NACJD. Conducted periodically since 1987, LEMAS collects data from over 3,000 general purpose state and local law enforcement agencies, including all those that employ 100 or more sworn officers and a nationally representative sample of smaller agencies. This report focuses specifically on state-level policing, where women have long been substantially underrepresented. In the two decades of LEMAS that she examined, Yu found that the overall percentage of female sworn officers in state police agencies remained relatively stagnant, with only a small increase from 6.5 percent in 2000 to 6.9 percent in 2020. However, the absolute number of women officers increased by 14 percent over the same period, suggesting modest progress. Representation varied widely from state to state, with just over half of the agencies successfully improving their female representation during the 20-year period. Check here for more publications using LEMAS.

October 23, 2025