To test the effectiveness of their approach, the authors developed a large-scale research project using interviews and surveys with men and women firefighters, along with a general population survey.įirst, they interviewed active-duty firefighters from around the country, following up with in-depth focus groups and asking what qualities members considered most important to succeed in the fire service. In other words, making salient the notion that firefighters carry people out of burning buildings and enter people’s homes to help care for injured and sick family members enables people more easily to see both men and women who have the right mix of qualifications as successful firefighters. The best way to do that, they say, is to promote the idea that stereotypically feminine traits like compassion are equally important for success in the fire service as stereotypically masculine traits like physical strength. Instead, the authors propose changing how we view the firefighter prototype. However, research shows that gender stereotypes are incredibly difficult to change. One potential solution would be to challenge gender stereotypes - for example, by pointing out that many women firefighters can meet the job’s physical strength requirements. That, in turn, makes it harder to imagine a woman in that role. If the prototypical firefighter is someone who carries people out of burning buildings, that’s going to fit more closely with masculine stereotypes. In their paper, Danbold and Bendersky argue that acceptance of women in the fire service is hindered by a clash between the collection of traits seen as essential to be a good firefighter - called prototypes - and the social stereotypes commonly assigned to men and women. Although having the physical strength and technical skills to confront fires is absolutely essential to the job, the high proportion of medical calls firefighters respond to means that an additional set of skills is required to succeed as a modern firefighter, including the ability to display warmth, patience and empathy for victims. In contrast, two-thirds of calls requested medical assistance. (Another 4% were mutual aid requests from other agencies.) About 4% of the calls in 2016 came in response to fires, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
Emphasizing those qualities can make it easier to imagine women in a firefighter’s job.įirefighters, it turns out, spend relatively little time battling blazes. Traits like empathy, which are thought of as feminine, are just as legitimate and critical to success as traditionally masculine traits, they say.
The way to increase acceptance of women in the fire service, they propose, is to have a more balanced view of what it takes to be a good firefighter.
That’s the premise of a paper forthcoming in Organization Science by NYU’s Felix Danbold and UCLA Anderson’s Corinne Bendersky. Any effort to increase their numbers in the fire service, the argument goes, would mean a dangerous erosion of the fitness standards needed for firefighting.īut what if we’re thinking about the problem all wrong? What if qualities like compassion and warmth - stereotypically associated with women - are just as necessary for success in firefighters as “masculine” traits like strength and stamina? The usual explanation for such a low percentage is that women simply aren’t up to the extreme physical demands of the job. Aligning people’s idea of a firefighter with the range of work and skills actually required might reduce gender bias
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