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The macho image of male police officers dealing with terrorist attacks and the Grenfell Tower disaster could be putting off women from joining the Met, Scotland Yard chief Cressida Dick said today.

She said the terror attacks in London in 2017, when mainly male firearms officers were deployed on the streets, and the Grenfell fire in the same year had led to a mistaken view of policing as a “very physical service”.

Ms Dick told the Standard: “People have got it into their heads that you have to be supremely fit or strong when actually the vast majority of our officers, most of the time, are not using huge amounts of physical strength to get the job done. They are using their communication skills, their problem-solving skills and their analytical skills.”

The Met commissioner said more had to be done to challenge the “stereotypes and myths” of policing as a macho culture.

Her comments came as she attended a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey today to mark 100 years of women police officers in the Met.

Last year the force launched its first recruitment campaign focused on women, entitled “Strong”. There are around 8,000 women in the Met which is about 27 per cent of the officer workforce. But Home Office figures show the Met has a low proportion of women officers compared with most other UK forces — only those at the City of London and Cleveland are lower.

Ms Dick said research had shown two possible reasons for a reluctance among some women in London to consider a police career. “In some of our minority communities there will be more questions asked about joining the police than there might be in others,” she said. “We are working hard to address this, for instance our Association of Muslim Police have lots of capable women officers and they are working really hard to get the message out that Muslim women can thrive and have a really important role to play.”

Secondly, she said: “We have observed that the major incidents in 2017 of the terrorist attacks and Grenfell have portrayed an image of a very physical service, people have got it into their heads you have to be supremely fit or strong, a sort of macho image.”

She added: “Of course we need confident, resilient people but I think there is still some way to go for some parts of the wider public not to see policing as primarily a male-dominated job.”

Ms Dick, who has said she wants half of London’s officers to be women, pointed out that many detective teams were now 50 per cent women — something “unheard of” 30 years ago.

About 2,000 people were expected at today’s Westminster Abbey service.

Earlier, 12 women officers paid tribute to the first female patrols by wearing replica 1919 uniforms designed by the head seamstress of the Met’s uniform section. They recreated one of the earliest group photos of Met women officers, taken in Westminster in 1919.