By Jan Sears
The Press Enterprise
REDLANDS, Calif. — Redlands’ only female firefighter has sued the city, its fire chief and two battalion chiefs, alleging they engaged in gender discrimination in denying her a promotion to captain.
Eva Toppo said she applied twice to be a captain, completed written and oral exams at the top of the field but was not promoted.
She alleges the fire chief told her she wouldn’t be respected as a captain because she is female, and claims she was passed over in favor of firefighters with less experience.
Toppo, 36, was promoted to engineer in July 2009.
About the same time her lawsuit was filed, Monday, June 11, 2012, Toppo was promoted to captain.
Her attorney, Michael McGill of Lackie, Dammeier and McGill in Upland, said the promotion won’t affect the lawsuit.
“It doesn’t change the fact that she should have been promoted months earlier,” McGill said Friday, June 29.
Toppo did not respond to a request for comment.
The city has filed a legal response denying all of the allegations in Toppo’s complaint. Redlands officials declined to comment further.
Toppo’s lawsuit alleges that she was subjected to retaliation and harassment for complaining and that her “working conditions became intolerable.”
The lawsuit states that, after taking the captain’s test in 2009, Toppo met with Fire Chief Jeff Frazier, who told her she had performed exceptionally but would not be respected as a captain because she is a woman. She claims Frazier told her that if she served some time as an engineer, “things would go more smoothly for her as a captain,” her lawsuit states.
She took the captain test again in 2011 and was told she had finished second, her lawsuit states. Toppo said that she again met with Frazier and was told that the only obstacle to promotion was her gender.
“Don’t worry. You’re going to promote. Just be an engineer for another year or two and let the guys get used to the idea of a female captain,” Toppo claims Frazier told her.
Toppo also alleges in the lawsuit that she was criticized for taking maternity leave and was the target of rumors about affairs with other firefighters, which caused her such stress that she suffered two miscarriages.
Her lawsuit alleges that the defendants — the city of Redlands, Frazier and Battalion Chiefs David Graves and Jim Topoleski — violated the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender.
McGill said Toppo is proceeding with the lawsuit because she wants to ensure that other women in firefighting don’t get passed over for promotions they have earned.
“She wants people to know what happened, so it doesn’t happen to somebody else,” McGill said in a telephone interview.
Gender discrimination in firefighting and law enforcement is not uncommon but lawsuits are somewhat more rare, he said.
“I’ve had a handful of gender discrimination cases,” he said. “You don’t get that many because people are scared to come forward. They don’t want to jeopardize what they have, and you don’t always have concrete evidence.”
Firefighting and law enforcement are “male dominated environments. It’s difficult for females to advance in those professions,” McGill said.
Toppo recognized the reason she was not promoted after she first tested for the captain position, “but wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt,” McGill said.
“But then it happened again,” he said.
Toppo was hired by the Redlands Fire Department in June 2001 and was promoted to engineer in July 2009. She was named firefighter of the year in 2008.
She has run the department’s Spark of Love holiday toy drive since 2005, boosting the number of toys collected from a few hundred to more than 5,000, according to news reports.
Toppo also has been a lead instructor in the Redlands Emergency Services Academy, a weeklong program for high school graduates who are interested in firefighting careers. She is a graduate of the Crafton Hills College paramedic program.
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