Fire Dept. still dominated by white males, aldermen told
A Chicago Fire Department with a documented history of discrimination and racial hijinks remains an overwhelmingly white and predominantly male bastion, disappointed aldermen were told Wednesday.
Fire Commissioner Richard C. Ford II delivered the cold, hard statistics at City Council budget hearings.
Of the city’s 4,767 firefighters and paramedics, 65.2% are white, 16.6% are African American and 15.9% are Hispanic. And, they are over 90% male.
The numbers for CFD brass are even whiter.
With an eye toward the 2021 firefighters entrance exam, Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) asked how the department will improve those numbers.
“The Police Department — they really blast, trying to get black radio and everything, posting fliers, all our officers trying to get minority participants to apply. Do you all do that, too? Do you have a budget to do that?” Burnett said.
“We don’t right now have the funding to do that,” Ford replied. “But [the budget office] is going to assist us in doing some recruitment. . . . It should be cable. It should be TV. It should be social media — blasting the colleges so that we, in fact, reach out to young people.”
Ald. Michael Scott Jr. (24th) urged the department to advertise more.
“You’ve done a great job of kind of diversifying management,” Scott said, but “I’d really like to see more African Americans in the rank and file.”
Even more surprising — and disappointing to some aldermen — was the commissioner’s claim that the 450 female Chicago firefighters represent the largest contingent of women of any big-city fire department in the country.
Ford brushed past reporters seeking to ask why so few women apply. History may have something to do with it.
Under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago taxpayers spent nearly $2 million — and $1.7 million in legal fees — to compensate dozens of women denied firefighter jobs because of a now-scrapped test of upper-body strength.
A dozen women who wanted to become paramedics subsequently accused the department of devising two new physical agility tests equally biased against women.
The latest in a string of lawsuits filed in federal court alleged both tests were “invented to eliminate women” in a department where “discrimination against women is stubborn and purposeful.”
Last year, the department was accused of creating a hostile work environment in which women are sexually harassed with impunity by superiors and a “code of silence” covers it up.