Discrimination in the Fire Service Over Time,

Discrimination in the Fire Service

Over time, nearly every profession once considered the exclusive province of men (and in the case of the United States, white men) has gradually been made accessible to minorities, whether through practical necessity, changing cultural standards, or court orders. However, this process has proceeded unevenly, so that even now there remains institutionalized discrimination which serves to preclude women and other minorities from the same opportunities as white men, and one of the areas where this can be seen most clearly is the case of the fire service, where women and other minorities have been systematically denied employment due to inherently discriminatory testing and evaluation practices. What makes the fire service one of the more interesting sites of workplace discrimination, however, is not just the fact that women and other minorities have been denied employment or promotion, but that certain programs intended to do away with this discrimination have instead merely unfairly discriminated in the other direction, denying qualified applicants in favor of someone less qualified due to his or her status as a minority. To see how these problems come about as well as the ways people are attempting to solve them, one may examine the New York, Chicago, and Dallas fire departments, all of which have had relatively high profile cases of discrimination in the last twenty years. Examining how each of these cities has dealt with gender and racial discrimination will reveal how discriminatory practices can become institutionalized and the myriad complexities confronting anyone attempting to do away with these practices.

One of the largest, and least diverse, fire departments in the entire country is the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), and it offers an ideal example with which to start an examination of discrimination in the fire service in general, because the Department has been accused of both gender and racial discrimination, and discriminatory practices both in regards to hiring and promoting. Most recently, a federal judge ruled against the FDNY, stating that "New York City intentionally discriminated against black applicants to the Fire Department by continuing to use an exam that it had been told put them at a disadvantage," resulting in a number of otherwise qualified minority applicants being rejected (Baker, 2010, p. A.30). The effects of discrimination are stark; as of 2007, the FDNY included only 303 black firefighters, out of a total of almost 9000 (p. A.30). Examining this case in particular is helpful in understanding discrimination in the fire service, because although the ruling appears fairly straightforward, it reveals some of the complexities inherent in confronting workplace discrimination. Firstly, the judge's ruling actually contains three important details regarding the discriminatory practices of the FDNY encapsulated in the exam, because he did not rule in favor of the plaintiffs solely because the exam discriminated against minorities. Before highlighting the other reasons for the judge's ruling, however, it will be useful to briefly discuss how the exam itself was discriminatory, and how the FDNY reacted upon learning this fact.

The exam was a kind of standardized written test, akin to an SAT or GRE, that is commonly used in conjunction with the physical tests required to qualify as a firefighter. This particular lawsuit was only related to a specific exam used between 1999 and 2007 that disproportionately disqualified minority applicants as a result of culturally biased text, meaning that applicants could fail not because they were ignorant of the necessary information or critical thinking skills, but rather that the cultural assumptions which underlined the particular language and examples used in the exam served to make it more difficult for non-white applicants (Baker, 2010, p. A.30). While this alone is an example of the kind of institutionalized discrimination that is often difficult for those in positions of authority to notice, as it seems unlikely that whoever wrote the exam did so with the intention of excluding minorities, the judge's ruling found that in addition to this subtle, institutionalized discrimination, the FDNY engaged in active, overt discrimination by continuing to use the exam even after being informed that it was unfairly and unhelpfully excluding otherwise qualified applicants, to the point that the judge "wrote that he found strong evidence to suggest that [Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former fire commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta] were made aware numerous times that the Fire Department's entrance exams were discriminatory, yet failed to take sufficient remedial action" (A.30).

Even with evidence that the exam in question was discriminatory, and that the FDNY continued to use it even after being informed about its faulty nature, one might suggest that the exam was nonetheless necessary, or at least better than nothing. However, even in this instance the point of the exam seems to exclusionary, because the judge further ruled that the information covered in the exam was not actually relevant to the job requirements of a firefighter (Baker, 2010, A.30). Subsequently, the judge's ruling has precipitated a reevaluation of the Department's hiring practices as well as attempts by those who were excluded on the basis of the exam to receive reimbursement for the jobs denied to them.

At the same time that New York Fire Department was grappling with accusations of racial discrimination, it was simultaneously being sued for gender discrimination. In 2006, "five ranking female Emergency Medical Service workers […] filed suit against Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the department, charging it routinely discriminates against women and keeps them from rising to the highest ranks," and furthermore, that women are consistently paid less than men at equal levels (Allan, 2006, p. 11). The lawsuit alleged that "males consistently receive promotions to high-level FDNY positions with less favorable recommendations and less experience" than female candidates, and that "the selection process used by the FDNY is subjective and not based on concrete data" (p. 11). Finally, the FDNY failed to make job postings widely available, so that many qualified candidates were unaware of these opportunities (in violation of New York labor laws). This case received far less attention than the racial discrimination case, likely due to the difficulty of proving a "culture of discrimination" compared to the relative ease of evaluating the utility and content of a single exam. Furthermore, because hiring practices are often more explicitly outlined than promotion practices, it is far easier to prove discrimination in the hiring process than in regards to promotions and pay. Nonetheless, it highlights the discrimination faced by women in the fire service, and in particular the fairly limited options they have when attempting to confront discrimination, a theme that will be seen recurring in the later discussion of Chicago's problems with gender discrimination.

Like New York, the Chicago Fire Department has suffered from gender and racial discrimination, and for largely the same reasons. In 2001 the NAACP back a lawsuit filed against the City of Chicago by "6,000 African-American firefighter candidates who allege that even after passing the city's written firefighter hiring test, only those who scored in the top 10% have been allowed to finish the preliminary process" (Dumas-Mitchell, 2001, p. 5). Once again, the focus of the lawsuit was on not only how the test itself disproportionately disqualifies minority applicants, but also the relevance of the test to the job requirements of a firefighter. The first problem was that "the City set the test standard at 65 as the passing score, but has only allowed people who scored 89 or above to continue on in the hiring process and take the other primary pre-employment test, a physical agility examination" (p. 5). This use of test "failed to meet professional and legal standards for test validation," because not only was the cut-off score of 89 arbitrarily determined and thus was not "validated with data such that the score distinguishes between those who can perform the job and those who cannot," but the test itself was not relevant to the actual skills needed to perform the duties of a firefighter (p. 5).

Thus, the arbitrary cutoff served to exclude minority applicants even if they were qualified to perform the duties of a firefighter, but even this arbitrary cutoff is only part of a larger problem with the test, because it did not even accurately test for the necessary skills. This is seen most obviously when one considers the fact that "while the test developer identified 46 essential firefighter abilities, the written exam attempts to measure only four of these abilities" (p. 5). By using the test as a means of culling applicants before allowing them to perform the arguably more relevant physical examinations, the fire department of Chicago essentially created an arbitrary barrier which would keep minority applicants from being able to compete with white applicants on a level playing field. This is especially atrocious considering that in Chicago, the vast majority of the residents are black or Latino, but make up less than 17% of the Chicago Fire Department (Strausberg, 2001, p. 1).

The city of Chicago has also been accused of gender discrimination, this time in relation to the physical aptitude test, or PAT, which includes "four components: arm lift, arm endurance, leg lift and hose drag/high rise pack carry" (Guzzardi, 2011). Most recently, the City is being sued by a woman who claims she successfully completed the PAT but was nonetheless rejected, and her lawsuit once again alleges that not only is the test inherently discriminatory, but that it does not actually relate to the skills required to be a firefighter. This particular case highlights the difficulties faced by women attempted to redress grievances, because "the department wouldn't tell her how she scored on the individual components of the test, or which part she might have failed," so that the question of her suitability essentially became a matter of the department's word against hers, with the department failing to offer any evidence for its claim that she failed (Guzzardi, 2011).

The physical aptitude portion of firefighting applications has long been the main source of contention for women attempting to become firefighters, and various cities have attempted to deal with it in various ways. In Chicago it originally included "timed exercises of hanging from a pole, climbing stairs carrying a 60-pound coiled hose and pulling a 150-pound dummy across a room without its feet touching the floor," but in 1985 the city "eased some of the demanding physical tasks and placed more emphasis on the written exam," but even then complaints have continued to surface that the remaining physical requirement are nothing more than a means of excluding women, and that they do not accurately test the skills needed to be a firefighter, which is the central argument of the aforementioned lawsuit (Glanton, 2011).

Chicago also offers some insight into the phenomenon of the unhelpfully named "reverse discrimination," in which white men have been passed over for employment or promotion in favor of less qualified women or minority candidates. For example, in 1986, women who passed the PAT "were placed ahead of men who scored higher" in an attempt to enact affirmative action, but this only served to engender resentment among both men and women by diminishing the accomplishments of both (Glanton, 2011). In addition, the city was accused by white firemen "who charged reverse discrimination after the city passed over them to hire Blacks and Latinos," but their lawsuit was ultimately thrown out by the Supreme Court without comment (Strausberg, 2001, p. 1).

"Reverse discrimination" is obviously an unhelpful term, because it really just describes discrimination against white men, but in doing so serves to continue the racial and gendered paradigm which views white men as a kind of neutral default and underlies nearly all forms of institutionalized discrimination. Thus, while this essay uses the term because of its occurrence in the sources cited and the cases under discussion, it is worth pointing out that uncritically discussing discrimination based on gender and race that happens to be directed against white men only serves to reinforce one of the major assumptions which allows discrimination to perpetuate itself. Nonetheless, these two examples of so-called reverse discrimination offer a bridge to a consideration of one more city's experience with discrimination in the fire service, because Dallas' experience with discrimination effectively demonstrates the danger of attempting to arbitrarily distinguish between different victims of discrimination, as if it were more or less acceptable depending on who is discriminated against.

In 1995, "eighteen white Dallas police officers […] sued the city for more than $1.5 million, claiming they lost promotions to the rank of senior corporal to minorities who scored lower on jobs tests," but the officer's lawsuit was only made possible by an earlier case regarding so-called "skip promotions" in the Dallas Fire Department ("White officers sue city," 1995, p. 3). In 1988, the Dallas City Council adopted an affirmative action policy which included the practice of skip promotions, and in 1991, the Dallas Fire Fighters Association sued, arguing that the promotions were discriminatory and illegal (Jennings, 2009). In 1995 a federal judge "declared unconstitutional the part of the city's affirmative action program that allowed women and minorities in the fire department to be skip-promoted over higher scoring white males," and the issue was finally decided three years later, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed (the Supreme Court declined to hear the case) ("White officers sue city," 1995, & Jennings, 2009). Dallas and Chicago's contrasting experiences with discrimination against white men reveals some of the difficulties in combating discrimination, because too often attempts to rectify past wrongs do not confront the actual problem, but rather simply alter the trajectory of those wrongs toward a previously privileged target.

Despite Dallas' history of overzealous affirmative action, the city has nonetheless been accused of gender discrimination, most recently in 2009, when "Dallas Fire-Rescue's highest-ranking civilian female sued the city […] alleging that she and other female employees in the male-dominated department were subjected to sexual discrimination and harassment" (Eiserer, 2009). In particular, she claimed that she was demoted "after complaining about lewd e-mails and sexual discrimination by high-ranking fire officials," and furthermore, that the chief of the department "made clear the reasons for her demotion: he expressly stated 'the problem is, you're a woman and they think you're running the department" (Eiserer, 2009). This came in addition to discriminatory statements and actions directed at other women in the department, which were included as part of the lawsuit.

Of all the cases considered here, this is perhaps the most blatant instance of discrimination, and it once again demonstrates the difficulty of effectively precluding gender or racial discrimination without being able to force a change in the culture at large. In the course of roughly twenty years, the city of Dallas went from being sued for favoring women and minorities over white men to being sued for favoring men over women, and in all that time it seems unlikely that anything has changed except for the official policies. While this particular case highlights the discriminatory actions of a single individual, the fact that it was the fire chief himself seems to point towards a larger problem; namely, the fact that people holding discriminatory views such as his (which are often readily apparent) are nonetheless deemed qualified for leadership positions.

In examining the experiences of discrimination in these particular cities' fire services, this study has attempted to uncover some of the underlying issues affecting all workplace discrimination, and to confront the almost unconscious ways in which discrimination, or at least the attitudes and structures necessary for its propagation, is supported by an uncritical approach to the largely irrelevant differences between people of different genders and races. As a conclusion, briefly recounting the particular cases of discrimination covered in this study will help to highlight these underlying issues.