FDNY Numbers Lag Far Behind Other CitiesFirefighter Offers a Cautionary Tale About Women’s Treatment in Ranks
‘I WAS HARASSED FOR BEING A WOMAN FIREFIGHTER’: Firefighter Tracy Lewis, a 13-year veteran of the FDNY, testified at a City Council hearing Dec. 13 that she was subjected to years of harassment and ostracism in her Brooklyn firehouse because of her gender. ‘I don’t ask for special treatment, but I’m treated like I have a disease or something,’ she said.
Posted: Monday, December 16, 2013 5:15 pm
It began before she even arrived at the firehouse. By 2003, Firefighter Tracy Lewis had been happily serving in another house in Brooklyn for almost three years, where as one of the handful of women in the FDNY, she never found herself treated differently.
But after budget cuts shuttered her firehouse, Ms. Lewis was transferred to Engine Co. 257 in Canarsie, where she says that from the minute she walked in, something was obviously wrong.
Frozen Out, Harassed
She’d start to ask a question of a fellow firefighter—procedures can vary slightly from house to house, and she wanted to follow protocol—and he’d walk away before she could finish. Ms. Lewis said it quickly became apparent that her peers weren’t speaking to her, for reasons she didn’t understand.
Harassment soon followed, Ms. Lewis said, and continued for years. Her gear that she’d carefully stowed in its place was thrown onto a high ledge above the rest of the cubbies, and she had to get a ladder to retrieve it. (She said this happened after she’d been at the firehouse for at least a year, and it didn’t happen to other new members of the house. When she complained, her colleagues claimed she’d forgotten to put the gear away.)
Men would use her bathroom, not flush the toilet and leave men’s magazines open to pictures of scantily-clad women. Once, just before a fire call, she discovered an egg in one of her boots. Another time, someone tampered with the lock to her bathroom so she couldn’t go inside and change into her uniform. She got threatening and harassing phone calls at work.
“I come in here, I do my job, I don’t ask for anything,” she remembers thinking. “I don’t ask for special treatment, but I’m treated like I have a disease or something.”
‘We’ll Be the Laughingstock’
Ms. Lewis was later told by a few people, including an acquaintance who worked at headquarters, that before she even arrived in Canarsie, an officer from Engine 257 had repeatedly called her old firehouse and FDNY headquarters and begged them not to send her there.
“She can’t come here,” she was told the officer said. “We’ll be the laughingstock of the battalion.”
Ms. Lewis, who is African-American, said the issue appeared to be her gender rather than her ethnicity, and that those who overheard the phone calls agreed. There were other people of color at Engine 257, many of whom kept out of the matter, since anyone who talked to her would become a target himself. A colleague later told her that many in the house had never worked with a woman before, but that years ago, some had clashed with one of the original women admitted to the department in 1982, and “she made it bad for all the women.”
A 5-Year Ordeal
The mistreatment, she said, continued until she was transferred to another firehouse in 2008.
Ms. Lewis told her story at a City Council hearing Dec. 13 where firefighters and civil-rights advocates looked at the makeup of the FDNY and asked why, in a city as diverse and progressive as New York, just 37 people out of 10,500 are female.
Three decades after the first 41 women entered the FDNY, women’s numbers have never reached that original level. Today, they make up just one-third of 1 percent of the force—less than in the five other largest cities in the U.S., and much less than in the NYPD and in the active-duty U.S. military population, where in 2012, women made up 18 percent and 14.6 percent.
In the fire departments of other cities, their numbers are much more robust—though still a small minority.
According to the Department of Labor, women made up 3.6 percent of Firefighters nationwide in 2010—roughly 10 times their proportion in New York.
15-17% in Minnesota
But in some cities, they’re much better represented. In Minneapolis, female firefighters have hovered between 15 and 17 percent of the force. Fire departments in cities as diverse as San Francisco; Madison, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado; and Miami employed at least 13-percent women, according to a 2008 survey conducted for the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services.
Retired Fire Capt. Brenda Berkman expressed frustration with the glacial pace of women’s hiring.
In 1977, she led the charge to bring women into the department, despite intense opposition by union and FDNY officials. A year later, she and about 90 women failed the physical entry test—she notes that the personnel administrator at the time called it the hardest physical exam that had ever been given. Ms. Berkman then served as the sole named plaintiff in the discrimination suit that forced the city to revamp that test, allowing her and 40 others to enter the ranks in 1982. She suffered intense harassment and hostility during her 25 years on the job.
Questions Run Component
Ms. Berkman noted that the numbers since then have been dismal. Between 2000 and 2008, only 23 women were hired, alongside thousands of men. This year, 1,952 women took the written exam, more than the last three tests combined. More than 360 have scores high enough to have a good shot at being hired, fire officials say. But out of the first two classes this year, only eight women entered the firehouse. (Hiring was frozen for several years by a Federal Judge after a discrimination suit was brought over the low numbers of blacks and Latinos on the job.)
FDNY Assistant Commissioner for Recruitment and Diversity Michele Maglione said more than 6,000 recruitment events have been held in the five boroughs in recent years, targeting both women and ethnic minorities. Three information sessions were held for women leading up to the physical test, and the FDNY has used phone banking to reach out to women. The mentorship program has also “aggressively [sought] female candidates,” she said.
Questions Run Component
Ms. Berkman portrayed the issue as partly the fault of newer physical requirements to graduate from the Fire Academy. The CPAT—the test to determine whether candidates are qualified to enter the Academy—was developed with fire officials across the country and validated by the U.S. Department of Justice, she noted. It measures a series of skills designed to mimic common firefighter tasks, including dragging a weighted mannequin and a hose, raising a ladder, breaching a hole in a mock ceiling and crawling through the dark.
But Ms. Berkman questioned the validity of the mile-and-a-half run that probies must complete in 13 minutes at the start of Fire Academy and in 12 minutes at the end. (According to FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon, it has been in place since 1999.) FDNY Chief Medical Officer David Prezant said it has a long history of being used to test aerobic conditioning, and is applied by the U.S. military and those in other countries.
Council Fire and Criminal Justice Services Chairwoman Elizabeth Crowley asked Chief of Department Edward Kilduff if he thought those standards were fair and he said, “I want the fittest firefighters that we can possibly have, and annually we continue to test for cardiac fitness. If in fact we have folks that are struggling to meet that [running] goal, we spend a tremendous amount of time working with those folks to reach that goal.”
Not Used After That
But firefighters aren’t ever tested with a run after they graduate the Academy, Ms. Berkman noted. Each year, they must simply do a weighted stair climb—a task directly related to the demands of the job—and have their blood pressure taken and a blood test for other measures of cardiac fitness.
When Ms. Crowley asked Mr. Kilduff if he thought most active firefighters can still pass the running test, he answered yes. Ms. Berkman, sitting in the audience and looking extremely skeptical, mouthed, “Nooo way.”
“I think one of the really important points to emphasize is that this particular requirement has never been validated according to the EEOC guidelines,” she later told the Council. “So they haven’t pulled out incumbent firefighters and said, ‘Run a mile and a half for us to set the benchmark by which we are then going to test the new Firefighters.’ And [it’s] very telling; once you graduate from the New York City Fire Academy, that’s the end of your physical testing.”
‘Artificial Barriers’
“You don’t run a mile and a half every year,” she said. “And I think that really points to the lack of validity to these artificial barriers that are being put out in the Fire Academy. And they’re recent. They’re very recent.”
The FDNY also uses a more-strenuous obstacle course called the FST to weed less-fit probies from the Fire Academy, a home-grown test that Chief Kilduff acknowledged wasn’t used in other U.S. fire departments that he knows of.
Sarinya Srisakul heads the United Women Firefighters, an FDNY group founded and led for years by Ms. Berkman. She noted that while the FST has been used for at least the nine years she’s been a Firefighter, for the Academy class that just graduated this month it’s a requirement for graduation, rather than one of several measures that, taken together, they must pass. And they now have to meet the median times of the previous classes to graduate.
Ms. Srisakul said that using the FST in this way to weed out probies from the Academy is just another barrier that makes it harder for women to graduate. And she noted that the FST, unlike the CPAT, isn’t a nationally-validated test developed with experts from across the country.
UFA: Not Tough Enough
Uniformed Firefighters Association officials, however, have criticized even the CPAT as too easy.
In March, UFA President Stephen Cassidy told THE CHIEF-LEADER that New York has taller, older buildings than most cities and needs a tougher physical test.
“CPAT is a minimum standard,” he said. “Minimum standards are unacceptable to be a New York City Firefighter.”
“We have tens of thousands of buildings that have been grandfathered in as building codes changed,” he added. “We have a higher number of skyscrapers that don’t have sprinkler systems than any other city in the country.”
But Ms. Berkman said sticking with a nationally-validated test like the CPAT will ensure that the test is both fair and identifies those with relevant skills.
Badly Underrepresented
Marc Bendick Jr., a Washington, D.C. economist and expert in employment discrimination, recently completed a Ford Foundation-funded study on the experience of women firefighters nationwide. He compared the participation of women nationwide in other labor-intense jobs—what he called “dirty, dangerous, and demanding” occupations—and looked at the best practices of departments where more females participated.
In a world where women were treated equally, he told the Council, we could expect to see roughly 17 percent of women in the FDNY. That’s 1,890 women, instead of the roughly 100 total among both firefighters and Emergency Medical Service personnel.
Ms. Srisakul said she commends the Fire Department for its stepped-up recruitment efforts. But she said more needs to be done.
“They’re in denial that there’s even a problem,” she said of the low numbers. “The only way this will change is if the department makes a commitment to increase the number of women. They need to step up their game.”
‘Failure of Leadership’
Ms. Lewis has long since settled into life in her firehouse in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she’s had a positive experience and hasn’t encountered any sexism. She said although she was previously targeted because she was a woman, such bullying can sometimes happen in firehouses for other reasons, too, and it’s fire officers who are equipped to put a stop to such harassment.
Calling her bad experience in Canarsie “a failure of leadership,” she said the officers at her new house would never allow such bad behavior.
At Engine 257, she’d tried to ignore the bad treatment and keep her head down, figuring reporting it wouldn’t help. Eventually, a Deputy Chief reported it to the EEOC, and the harassment worsened, with Ms. Lewis’s colleagues assuming it was she who had called. Her officer resisted the EEOC’s attempts to intervene, she claimed, and she eventually went to John Coombs, the president of the Vulcan Society of Black Firefighters. He and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano met and managed to get her transferred the following day.
‘Some Had It Worse’
“Some of these women who initially came on [in 1982] had it far worse than me,” she said, explaining why she tried to endure it for so long. “One woman, they were threatening to push her down the stairs.” Some firefighters’ wives also picketed, claiming these female firefighters were endangering their husbands. “Every day I’d say to myself, ‘This is a walk in the park [comparatively]; I can do this,’” she added.
But Ms. Lewis recently learned that another woman had been assigned to the same firehouse. Although fire officials said most of the ringleaders during her bad experience had retired or been transferred, she felt she should say something publicly.
A Chief in a neighboring battalion said he’d keep an eye on the situation, calling Ms. Lewis’s treatment “a disgrace to the Fire Department,” Ms. Srisakul said.
“But five years is not a lot in the FDNY, especially when they haven’t hired anyone that whole time,” she added.
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