In an article printed in the Harvard Business Review, a UCLA professor argued that there are too many white male firefighters in America.
Corinne Bendersky, Professor of Management and Organizations at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, who does research on “gender bias,” posited “black firefighters still face challenges with social exclusion and explicit racism,” and “firefighters tend to default to a reductive set of traits (physical strength evaluated through strict fitness tests, for example) that serve to maintain white men’s dominance in the fire service.”
In addition, Bendersky opined that because 64% of calls for firefighters are triggered by medical emergencies, being male is often insufficient, writing, “To succeed as a firefighter, stereotypically masculine traits like brawn and courage are simply not enough. Firefighters also need the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to deliver medical emergency aid, support each other through traumatic experiences, and engage intimately with the communities they serve.”
Bendersky noted that 96% of career firefighters are men, and 82% are white. She claims, “Many fire departments recognize that their lack of diversity as a problem and say they’re committed to increasing racial and gender diversity.” She cites research she has done that prompted her to write, “when the topic of female firefighters came up, the importance of physical strength was consistently and spontaneously invoked to justify the relative absence of women in the fire service, but the importance of compassion (a female-stereotyped trait) was rarely, if ever, brought up to argue for bringing more women into the profession.”- READ MORE