These essays together offer insights into a range of experiences and reflections on the roles of women in preventing and perpetrating violence, and consider the application of these to the challenge of preventing and countering terrorism. As governments, international organizations and civil society actors consider the urgent need to develop contextually tailored responses and policies, these contributions highlight the need to understand pre-existing dynamics while forging innovative responses. They emphasize the importance of perspectives from the field as well as academia in informing critical policy decisions and program design and implementation efforts, while also underscoring the need for far greater investment in research and analysis that goes beyond traditional notions of women’s roles. Most of all, they reiterate that responding to terrorism and security threats is not just a man’s role, but that without integrating a gender perspective and including women in the conceptualization, implementation and evaluation stages, critical opportunities to to enhance the effectiveness, sustainability and relevance of P/CVE measures could be lost.