Hampshire Police Federation Chair takes up Chairs role in National Women’s Group

HELPING officers deal with the menopause and encouraging more women to become Reps are at the top of the to-do list for the new chair of the PFEW’s Women’s Group – Hampshire Police Federation Chair Zoe Wakefield.

“We had a really good network of women’s Reps, not just across the region but across the whole country, and I was the Sergeant’s Women’s Rep for Hampshire for several years,” Zoe said.

“We worked really well together on numerous issues that effected female officers.

“Sadly we’ve lost quite a few of our female Reps, so the working group has been established now, and we’ve got a core group of passionate Reps.

“We want to get ourselves back to where we were in terms of our networking and our communication between female Reps across the country and look at all the key issues that are affecting women.”

One of those key issues is helping female officers deal with the menopause and ensuring workplaces understand their changing needs.

Regular meetings for group members have already been added to calendars too.

“There’s lots of good work happening nationally around the menopause, but we want to try and coordinate all that and share best practice,” Zoe said.

“There are also some issues in some forces with the level two public order uniform, so we want to again share best practice; which forces have got good uniform and can they share that with other forces that don’t?

“As Chair of the Women’s Group, I also want to promote nationally the work that I’ve been helping with in Hampshire around miscarriage and baby loss. There’s so much work to do, and I’m very excited about the role.

“We’ve got this core group of really good women who are all experienced Fed reps who all want to achieve the same goal,” Zoe added.

“We’ve lost quite a few Reps so we need to look at getting in contact with them to find out why they left, and then we need to look at how we can approach in the next triennials how we can encourage more women to stand as Reps as well.

“When we’ve got them as Reps, it’s about how we can develop them and keep them interested and look after them.”