When she told the driver, a big guy in his early 20s, that she was going to impound his car, she realized the danger of her situation, she recalled recently. %26#8220;He was out of his car, and he was really mad. His fists were clenched and his nostrils were flaring, and I thought, %26#8216;He%26#8217;s going to hit me!%26#8217; %26#8220;I was by myself, with no backup nearby,%26#8221; said the officer, who is 5 foot 7 and has short, red hair, piercing blue eyes and a steely demeanor. %26#8220;So I told him, %26#8216;What are you going to do now, hit me?%26#8217; It immediately defused the situation, and the guy calmed down.%26#8221;Like many women who become police officers, Ms. Bondurant learned early on to use her wits rather than physical force to get herself out of potentially violent situations. Last year, after nearly 25 years on the force, she was named the first female police chief in Plainsboro.She is following a trail originally blazed by Lola Baldwin, a young woman who was the first female police officer in the United States, hired by the Portland, Ore., police department, on April 1, 1908 %26#151; nearly 100 years ago to the day. After a century, the number of women serving as officers and police chiefs in the region and across the country is still low. Nationwide, women make up 14 percent of all officers. Only 1 percent of all police chiefs are female.But that is slowly changing, and Chief Bondurant and other female police chiefs in the area are symptomatic of that change. She is one of four women serving as chiefs in New Jersey. Connecticut also has four, and New York State has nine. They are part of a new wave of female police chiefs who are being more readily accepted into the top jobs, by their departments and by the public, than they were a few short years ago.%26#8220;We now have women chiefs in major cities in this country, so it%26#8217;s no longer quite as startling to see women in these jobs as it was 10 years ago,%26#8221; said Dorothy Moses Schulz, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the author of %26#8220;Breaking the Brass Ceiling: Women Police Chiefs and Their Paths to the Top%26#8221; (Praeger Publishers, 2004). %26#8220;Before, women felt they had to overcompensate to prove that they were competent as they tried to move up the ranks. Now, women are being taken seriously when they do compete for these jobs.%26#8221; Betsy Gelardi was recently named chief of the Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., police department after 23 years on the force. She is the first female police chief in Westchester County.%26#8220;When I was interviewing for the job, I told the panel: %26#8216;This is not about being male or female. Those days are long gone,%26#8217; %26#8221; she said. %26#8220;We%26#8217;re all cops. Since Day 1 I%26#8217;ve done everything that every man on this force has done… I%26#8217;ve gone into bar fights, I%26#8217;ve worked the midnight shifts.%26#8221;But while women are slowly moving into the top positions in policing, many question whether the brass, or glass, ceiling is still intact.%26#8220;It%26#8217;s been broken, but a lot of us are still walking on the shattered glass,%26#8221; said Margaret Moore, director of the National Center for Women and Policing and a former undercover narcotics officer in New York City. %26#8220;It%26#8217;s not easy to work your way up in a police department if you%26#8217;re a woman. I think women have a long way to go in policing to get any type of equality.%26#8221;While women are chiefs in Detroit, San Francisco and, more recently, Washington, most small and rural agencies do not have any women in top command positions. Ms. Moore and other experts cite various obstacles to women entering policing and pursuing a job as chief: a lack of family-friendly policies, long hours, night and weekend shifts, hostility and even sexual harassment from other officers.%26#8220;A lot of good women don%26#8217;t want to make being a police chief their career pinnacle because the higher up you go, the higher the level of hostility,%26#8221; Ms. Moore said.Lynn Baldoni, chief of the Middletown, Conn., department for almost two years, remembers the resentment she felt when she started being promoted. 1 2 Next Page %26#x00bb;
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