Female Firefighters Essay

Female Firefighters: Women in the Fire Service Female firefighters have been a fairly recent addition to the fire service. Firefighting was thought to be a man’s job. Since the Civil Rights Movement, female firefighters are becoming more and more common even though they currently only consist of about 3% of the entire fire service. The acceptance and proper treatment of female firefighters has been difficult over the past 50 years, but they continue to make headway. Gender bias and sexual harassment has been a major issue with females joining the fire service. Females have been verbally abused, sexually abused, and worse yet even raped. A lot of times, their complaints went unheard or the women were too afraid to tell anyone. Recently in the Tri-City Herald, it discussed that a “female Kennewick firefighter filed a lawsuit against the City of Kennewick and the fire department because of discrimination and no promotions even though she repeatedly applied for a higher rank. The City did not want to go to court so they settled on approximately $600,000 which of that money, she would get $349,000” (Kristi Pihl). The problem with lawsuits like this is that they have to resign from their position and it makes it a lot difficult to be hired on with other departments. In how far this country and women have come over the …show more content…
For some reason, the stereotype of women includes not being capable of doing a masculine and dangerous job. Instead of just being capable of doing the job and having coworkers accept that, women have had to go above and beyond by working at least twice as hard to prove themselves. Michael Caine has a saying that defines women in the fire service very well which is “Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like hell underneath” (Michael Caine). Females that have joined the fire service have worked so hard to get to where they are at and it is inspiring for their strong desire to help