Copyright 2006 The Roanoke Times
All Rights Reserved
By CHRISTINA ROGERS
The Roanoke Times (Virginia)
Along a hallway in the Cave Spring firehouse hangs a row of grainy black-and-white photographs with scenes of dirt roads, wood-frame fire wagons and all-male fire crews.
Natalie Dibling, a 25-year-old firefighter with the Roanoke County Fire and Rescue Department, walks by these pictures each workday, a seemingly stark reminder of the once impenetrable brotherhood.
But she simply shrugs them off. After all, she’s not a firewoman but a firefighter, and “being a girl” doesn’t have much to do with how well she performs as a member of her eight-person crew — all of whom have their individual strengths and weaknesses, she said.
“I kind of stick out like a sore thumb, and I don’t,” said Dibling, a Virginia Tech graduate who joined the department in November.
Her job as a firefighter is just that — a job. And a rewarding one at that. Starting salaries hover around $30,000, and three Roanoke Valley fire departments — Roanoke, Salem and Roanoke County — pay for medical training and community college courses. Some women in Dibling’s department even prefer the shift work, saying it gives them more time to spend with their families.
Still, two decades after the first Roanoke Valley firehouse opened its doors to women in 1986, women make up only a sliver of the valley’s full-time firefighters.
Today, of the 452 career firefighters working in Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem, only 13 are women, or about 2.9 percent.
Merely opening the doors to women, it seems, is not enough.
Tough physical standards and lingering cultural stereotypes have made it difficult for departments to recruit and retain women, fire officials say. While some localities have made strides in hiring more female firefighters — Roanoke County fire officials say they have hired four since 2001 after nearly a decade of having none — others have seen their numbers dwindle.
Women account for about 3.3 percent of the 243,000 career firefighters working in the United States, according to a 2005 survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Those figures are gradually changing, said Linda Willing, an adjunct professor at the National Fire Academy — up from zero as of 1974, when Arlington, Va., Fire and Rescue hired the country’s first female firefighter.
But change has been slow.
“The fire service has been culturally and historically very resistant to hiring women,” Willing said. “And there was discrimination, no doubt. But many of those barriers have broken down.”
Passing the test
Trumping long-standing stereotypes has been a challenge for recruiters.
The image of a soot-smeared male firefighter cradling an infant is not one easily overturned, and without an updated image in wide circulation, some officials worry that the opportunities for women firefighters won’t be realized.
“My guess is that not many people have seen a woman firefighter,” Willing said. “If you haven’t seen one, how do you know you want to be one?”
And even those women willing to shrug off macho stereotypes still face the departments’ physical abilities test, in which brawn is a big asset. Male and female applicants take the same test, the Candidate Physical Abilities Test, a 10-minute, 20-second hustle that has applicants swinging a 10-pound sledgehammer and dragging a 165-pound dummy 70 feet.
“The agility test has been a major downfall for us,” said Fran Gonzalez, 35, a firefighter at Roanoke County’s Clearbrook Station. Gonzalez joined the department three years ago after passing the test on her second try. “It takes a lot of upper-body strength dragging the dummy. You got to really want it.”
According to Roanoke County division chief Stephen Simon, the exam knocks out about 75 percent of the women who take it. To be sure, men fail too, at a rate of about 50 percent to 55 percent, he said.
“I think it is one of the toughest physical tests I’ve ever taken,” said Jonathon Wacek, a Roanoke County firefighter. “If they can pass it, I think it has definitely proved that women belong in the fire services.”
But sheer strength doesn’t guarantee a passing grade, as the test mimics a variety of firefighting tasks, such as running hoses and climbing stairs.
“If you think you have to be 250 pounds and a football player to pass the test, it’s not true,” Simon said. “Look at Natalie. She’s no power lifter, but she had the heart to train for it.”
To boost pass rates for women, the Roanoke Valley joint training center offers an orientation to the equipment and instructor-led training sessions for eight weeks before the tests.
In other Virginia fire departments, similar training sessions have shown promising results. Prince William County Fire and Rescue is one of the few departments in the country with a female chief. It offers training sessions year-round, and in the past couple of years pass rates for women who participate have increased to 65 percent, said Bonnie King, a CPAT technician for the department.
“Often people have the physical ability, but what you have to bring out is their mental ability,” King said.
Rarely do firefighters encounter a situation where they’re required to sling a full-grown adult over their shoulder, Dibling said. And doing so while running or climbing down a ladder is a feat that “maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger could do,” she said, adding that the maneuver would likely injure both the firefighter and victim.
The preferred method, she said, would be either to drag or carry the victim out with help from a partner.
Cultural changes
Women who are able to tough out the physical demands still face a number of institutional barriers. The transition from a fiercely male firehouse to one accepting of women has been a challenge for some localities, particularly the ones that were among the first to hire women.
When the Salem Fire and Rescue Department hired its first two female firefighters in 1987, some male firefighters threatened to quit, said Chief Pat Counts. “It really turned a light on in people’s heads,” he said. “God bless those women that they stuck through it,” he added, saying that because of their persistence the department is “definitely more accepting now.”
Salem now has one female firefighter.
Other departments have faced similar hurdles.
Capt. Marci Stone and two other recruits were among the first women hired by the Roanoke Fire-EMS Department in 1997, following four other female firefighters who were absorbed into the department when the fire department and emergency response service merged in 1995. The city now has eight female firefighters.
“I didn’t see that I was different at first. I had volunteered in the past and was always accepted as one of the guys,” said Stone, who is 31 and the department’s highest-ranking female officer. “But now as I look back in hindsight, I can see where I’ve been challenged.”
She said many of her moves were under additional scrutiny, especially when she was promoted to lieutenant. But she says attitudes have changed since then, and she now feels accepted by the majority of her colleagues.
However, Stone, who recently gave birth to her first child, said she almost left the department in 2003 when it rescinded a maternity leave policy she had helped draft.
Acting Chief David Hoback with Roanoke Fire-EMS said that although the policy was an attempt to accommodate women, it was rescinded because it did not have an equal application to the department’s male population. “It was just the right thing to do,” Hoback said.
But without it, Stone said she would have had to choose between using up all her sick and vacation days or continuing to work on the truck — an option she said isn’t safe for her or her colleagues.
“I knew if we didn’t have a policy in place we were going to lose females. They were going to lose me,” she said.
An alternative-duty policy that applied to both male and female employees was drafted and accepted in August 2004.
Hoback acknowledges that the transition hasn’t always been easy, but the culture is changing.
“We had a tremendous turnover in leaders,” he said. “The sentiment is much different now than it was back then. Yes, in 1997 we might have had an issue. But because of the change we are much stronger for it.”
Still, some women tire of being in the spotlight all the time, said Willing, the National Fire Academy professor.
“Some women, particularly the ones that are the first to join, just get tired of always having to prove themselves, and always being under the microscope.”
She acknowledges, though, that women’s reasons for leaving are wide-ranging. Roanoke Fire-EMS saw four female firefighters leave in the past three years.
Gracey Humbert, who left in 2003, said her reasons were personal: She’d been working in the field since age 17 and wanted to complete her bachelor’s degree. But she did acknowledge that the department’s military-style, top-down structure was one factor in her decision to resign.
“I hated to leave because I already felt like I had the respect of most of the guys. I didn’t want to lay that torch down, but I felt I had to move on for personal reasons,” said Humbert, who joined the department through the 1995 merger.
Hoback said some of the women chose careers that offered better financial incentives. Two took jobs in the health care industry, which he said lately has been “drawing a lot of people out” of the city’s fire department.
“Trained paramedics can make good money,” he said.
Value of diversity
Despite the challenges of bringing women into the department, Roanoke Valley fire officials say they recognize the value of having a more diverse force.
“For me, our department should be representative of our community,” said Simon, who helps spearhead recruiting efforts for the Roanoke Valley Regional Fire-EMS Training Center.
The departments send recruiters to universities and job fairs but work with a budget of less than $6,000 a year for recruiting, Simon said.
In 2005, approximately 30 of Roanoke County’s 200 applicants were women. But only eight showed up for the test, Simon said.
Of those eight, two passed, he said. One of them opted for a job with the Blacksburg Police Department.
Still, some jurisdictions have done better than others. In Prince William County, women account for 10 percent of firefighters, King said.
“It’s a long commitment,” Willing said. “Some departments will put all this energy into it and not get results and then abandon it.”
And while for decades the fire department has been viewed as a brawn-based institution, it is beginning to evolve beyond those perceptions.
Whereas the fire department once focused solely on knocking down fires, firefighters now find themselves responding to EMS calls.
“This is a customer service organization,” said Roanoke County Lt. David Sizemore. “It’s not so much about strength anymore. We are looking for very strongly motivated people.”
It is also slowly becoming more attractive to women. Gonzalez, who had her two children before joining the department, says the three- or four-day-a-week work schedule gives her more time to do the “mom thing.”
But some female firefighters acknowledge that no amount of recruiting will change the fact that fire departments are going to remain predominantly male.
The challenges of juggling work and family are just too great, not to mention the hazards of the job and the 12- to 24-hour shift work.
“Everyone thinks it’s a hero’s job,” Stone said. “But it’s not glamorous at all. Most of it is hard blood and guts.”
And Stone recognizes that this is not a job a lot of women want to do. That, she believes, won’t change anytime soon.
“But we need to let them know it’s not all brawn,” she said. “It takes brains as well.”
WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A FIREFIGHTER
The Candidate Physical Abilities Test
Applicants must complete all eight obstacles in 10 minutes and 20 seconds or less. They must wear a 50-pound vest to simulate the weight of an oxygen tank and mask.
The obstacles are:
Climb a stair-climbing machine for three minutes, at a rate of 60 steps per minute.
Drag a 200-foot fire hose for 150 feet.
Remove tools from the fire truck, carry them 75 feet and return them to the truck.
Lift and extend a 24-foot ladder.
Swing a 10-pound sledgehammer with the force needed to break down a door or breach a wall.
Crawl through a dark 3-foot-high, 4-foot-wide tunnel.
Drag a 165-pound mannequin 70 feet.
Using a pike pole, jab and pull a ceiling door with the force needed to breach and pull down a ceiling section.
The gender gap in other professions
Protective service occupations overall
Total: 2,894,000
Women: 22.4 percent
Detectives and criminal investigators
Total: 123,000 Women: 24 percent
Police and sheriff’s patrol officers
Total: 677,000 Women: 14.3 percent
Auto mechanics and technicians
Total: 954,000 Women: 1.8 percent
Logging workers
Total: 85,000 Women: 1.7 percent
Construction workers
Total: 1,491,000 Women: 3.6 percent
Taxi drivers and chauffeurs
Total: 291,000 Women: 15.5 percent
Railroad conductors and yardmasters
Total: 51,000 Women: 0.7 percent
Source: 2005 Household Data survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics