Changing Gender Inequity

Cheryl Horvath is a Division Chief, assigned to Training, for the Northwest Fire District in Tucson, Arizona and Co-President of The International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services (WFES). She has been in the fire service since 1992, working as a full-time firefighter in Illinois where she served as union president for four years. Cheryl is a field instructor for the Illinois Fire Service Institute, teaching in the fire suppression, rescue, and management programs. In April, Cheryl along with WFES Co-President Laurie Mooney introduced “A National Report Card on Women in Firefighting.” (PDF)

As Cheryl and Laurie wrote in their cover letter, “The study validates decades of anecdotal wisdom about the inclusion, acceptance, testing and promotion of women in fire and emergency services. It also points to a future where, barring continued cultural and traditional resistance, women should comprise 17% (up from the current 3.7% national average) of the first responders work force.”

“I’d like people to be able to speak more freely about their mistakes. I’d like the fire service to be able to accept making mistakes as an important part of the learning process. I’m not talking about on the emergency scene necessarily. There are plenty of other times when we're in a non-emergency mode that people make mistakes and those are great learning opportunities. I don’t think that the fire service has entirely embraced the value of those moments."

“There are double standards about how mistakes are handled. Some people are allowed to repeatedly make mistakes and repeatedly screw up because they’re accepted by the culture—or in the majority if you will. And often times, those mistakes may be much more critical than the kind of stuff women may be berated for.

“We have to learn to accept failure from the highest level in the organization to the lowest level in the organization. We have to give people room to grow. I think it’s one of the areas that we really miss out on.

“I’d like us to be a lot more honest about what we do. I’d like there to be a time/motion study of the fire department where we look at the entire job—the whole job that we do—and design a testing system that’s reflective of it all not just 10% or 15% of the time and not just something that we would do by ourselves. I’ve yet to go on a fire call by myself. Everything I do is done within the confines of a company. Or I’ve partnered with someone. The only time I’ve done something by myself is to learn and practice tactile skills. When it comes to working and doing the job, I work with a team.

“For close to ten years I taught firefighter II academy for the Illinois Fire Service Institute—I still teach for them. I worked with some firefighters who were successful in being physically able to get the job but did not necessarily demonstrate all the critical characteristics needed to be a good firefighter. . They came down for 6 weeks of training and I sent these folks back knowing in my heart that they were not really good firefighters because they hadn’t demonstrated all the proficiencies of the job. Later on, we would hear that there was some type of follow-up performance problem.

“I guess I’m getting a little tired—for lack of a better way to put it—of always living up to a standard that doesn’t make sense for most of our day. 

“I had the equal opportunity engine company back in Urbana. I had a black male who was in his early 30s and a white male in his early 40s like me and we could handle any situation that came up and very rarely did it have anything to do with physical strength. It had to do with our ability to connect with people and problem solve.

“When’s the last time we really evaluated the job—when we took a look at what we really do everyday?

“Something as simple as the ability to take an order and communicate effectively that it’s been received and understood. Then, there’s the ability to be able to complete the task and the ability to be able to evaluate it afterwards to say what can make it better for us next time. Within all the different things we do there are so many other intangibles that need to happen for us to be successful yet we hold this huge physical requirement as ‘the standard.’ Once you meet that, then we look at everything else. I’m starting to question whether that should be the ‘brick wall’. Maybe it should be the other way around.

“I know that there are some departments looking at CPAT and instead of making it a requirement to get the job, they’re making it a requirement to graduate from their academy program. It becomes something you work up to rather than an obstacle at the front end.

“About five years ago, I was asked to help our neighboring department recruit women. There was a young lady who had just graduated from the University of Illinois. She was a Division 1 basketball player. She was over 6 feet tall and I think started in three of the four years she played.

“Obviously, this was a person who was used to working hard and showed that she could cross the finish line. She went to take their physical test. It wasn’t CPAT but a modified combat challenge. The time they used was one they set for themselves with a very rudimentary validation system.

“She went to cross the finish line with the dummy and she fell. And the toe of the dummy didn’t cross the finish line. She got up and pulled the leg of the dummy over the finish line but she didn’t make their time. They failed her because she didn’t have the toe of the dummy across the finish line.

“Their deputy chief wanted my help the next year. I said, ‘You know what, I’m out. I gave you one of the best candidates you could have had last year. She may not have gotten the toe of the dummy over the finish line but I guarantee if you had given her an order, she would have done it and done it quicker than anyone else. I guarantee that she had all the skills she needed for the job but you didn’t hire her because the dummy’s toe didn’t make it across the finish line. For every one of those, we could talk about the young man you hired last year who lied on his background check. You sent him through academy and then had to fire him afterwards. So which is the better employee?’

“He didn’t know what to say and was kinda blown away. I said, ‘I’m sorry but we have to stand for something here. You guys need to change the way you’re doing business because you’re eliminating phenomenal candidates with some test you designed years ago that doesn’t apply anymore.

“I want us to focus attention on the job not the test!”