Women still make up just a small fraction of firefighters
Departments trying to step up recruiting efforts
For Santa Clara County firefighter Angela Graham, responding to a hazardous materials call at a Stanford science lab, an overturned fuel tanker or a drug lab explosion are all part of her job.
“It’s really pretty fun,” says Graham, a hazmat specialist with the Santa Clara County Fire Department since 2006. She’s also one of only a dozen women who make up a firefighting workforce of 221.
Despite efforts to diversify its pool of candidates, the department’s share of female firefighters has actually dropped from 7% in 2019 to 5.4% today. Even though the number of women expected to enter a fire training academy next year is 22 — or 13 more than this year — “that’s minimal,” Graham said. “That’s not showing much effort.”
Compared to fire departments across the nation, Santa Clara County Fire isn’t an anomaly. According to the National Fire Protection Association, an average of 4% of firefighters in the United States are women.
In Oakland, some progress has been made. There, 32 of the 431 firefighters are women, or 7.4%. Firefighter Candice Koshman said that while the culture at the firehouse has “gotten way better” over her 11 years there, the department has “farther to go” in accommodating women.
As an engineer at the Oakland Fire Department, Koshman’s job consists of standing by the fire truck keeping an eye on the hoses’ water flow as her colleagues extinguish fires.
Koshman said she was drawn to the profession because her grandfather was a firefighter and during her former career as a plumber, a lot of her clients were female firefighters.
“As a plumber, when people were having a bad day, I had the skills and abilities to make their day better,” she said. “When I (became) a firefighter, that just got exponential.”
Though she is treated “really well” by her colleagues, Koshman said some things need to be changed. For one, most of Oakland’s firehouses don’t have a bathroom dedicated to women. For another, a lot of the department’s personal protective equipment, doesn’t fit her or her female colleagues.
To address those and other issues, Koshman and some of her colleagues created the group “Oakland Women & Non-binary Firefighters” in October — a project she said is supported by Fire Chief Reginald Freeman.
More must be done
In a statement, the fire department acknowledges more must be done. “Whether it’s addressing restrooms and changing facilities or the personal protective equipment our dedicated members wear in the field, this department has renewed its commitment to aligning the goals of our affinity groups and our capital improvement plans so that we achieve our goal of providing equal access to comparable, safe, and adequate facilities for all.”
The San Jose Fire Department, meanwhile, ranks below the national average, with women making up only 3.7% of its firefighting force — a slight improvement from 2.4% in 2019.
That kind of disparity was criticized in a December 2020 Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury report that blamed the scarcity of female firefighters in the San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View and Santa Clara County fire departments on poor recruiting techniques, gender bias and a lack of inclusivity.
The grand jury recommended that the four fire departments it scrutinized create programs to recruit more women, implement a mentoring program for female recruits and new hires, create gender-separate areas for bathing, sleeping and dressing in firehouses, and supply better-fitting equipment for female firefighters.
San Jose Fire spokesperson Erica Ray said the department has been taking steps to attract more women. In 2019, it introduced a boot camp “to orient women to the fire service career path through physical fitness education, information sharing, and mentorship by professional firefighters.”
The department also deferred certain minimum requirements for applicants such as emergency medical technician certificates and physical agility tests, she added.
Though modest, the increase in women firefighters to almost 4% over the past couple of years “is seen as movement in the right direction,” Ray said.
Like most other fire departments in the Bay Area and across the nation, Santa Clara County Fire — which serves Saratoga, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Campbell, Cupertino and the county’s unincorporated zones — is still trying to find the right formula.
Doug Baker, the department’s director of personnel services, acknowledges that this year’s candidate pool should have included more women.
“We’re happy to see an increase, even though it’s pretty small, but it is a very challenging thing to address,” Baker said. “The hard part is, it’s still a difficult physical job and maybe, just culturally here in the United States, there just isn’t the same kind of equal representation in terms of interest amongst men and women for this kind of a job. And we see this as kind of a long-term issue that we’re not going to solve overnight.”
Baker said even before the grand jury report was published, the department instituted a number of changes to recruit more women and minorities. Those included altering the initial application requirements in 2019 so women without engineering experience could still apply. And this year, Baker said the department expanded the total number of candidate spots in an attempt to get more female applicants.
Despite the slight increase in the female candidate pool, Rebecca Lo, who also works on the department’s recruitment efforts, admits “there’s definitely a lot more work that we want to continue to do.”
Girls Fire Camp
In October, the department sent a team of firefighters to meet with the Foothill College women’s basketball team hoping to spark some interest among the players in a firefighting career. Lo said the department intends to host a session of the NorCal FIRST ALARM Girls Fire Camp, which exposes high school girls to firefighting techniques in an attempt to make the profession more appealing.
“Part of this is going out and building that interest, hopefully locally here for women and minorities, just to (show) that this is a viable career option. But it’s an uphill battle for sure,” Baker said. “It’s difficult.”
Concerted efforts to hire more women at fire departments have been shown to pay off. The grand jury noted that Mountain View’s Fire Department started a special female recruitment process in 2015. Four years later, women accounted for 10% of its firefighters.