The Edmonton Police Service has joined a national campaign aimed at increasing the recruitment, retention and advancement of women in policing. The 30 Forward initiative seeks to have women make up 30 per cent of personnel across participating police services in Canada.

EPS says women have accounted for about 23 per cent of its workforce over the past five years. The service is pledging to make its workplace more welcoming and attractive to women through family supports, an inclusive workplace culture, mentorship opportunities and equity programs.

Police Chief Warren Driechel signed the pledge Wednesday at the Building Bridges Evidence-Based Policing Conference at the JW Marriott in Edmonton. Deputy Chief Andria Wasylyshen told the conference audience the service wants to learn from strategies used by police organizations across the country.

“We are looking at capitalizing on different ways and different strategies that are used across the nation to improve cultural bits that maybe other people have either struggled with or have experience with that we can employ to either reduce or minimize and/or to make sure we don’t go down that path,” Wasylyshen said.

Driechel told reporters that creating more opportunities for women at EPS is “something we talk about all the time.” He said the service has developed leadership frameworks to track women’s representation at each rank and identify who is in the promotion stream.

“We’ve now designed leadership frameworks to assess at each rank - how many females are in those ranks, who’s in that stream now for promotion - and we’ll continue to do that,” Driechel said.

The campaign encourages police services across Canada to take steps to recruit, retain and advance women. CTV News Edmonton’s Evan Kenny contributed files to the report.

Based on reporting by CTV News Edmonton.