UCLA Prof Thinks There Are Too Many Male Firefighters
“Many fire departments recognize that their lack of diversity as a problem”
Perhaps this professor should give up her academic career and become a firefighter. Who is stopping her?
The Daily Wire reports:
UCLA Professor: Too Many White Male Firefighters Out There
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.”
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Comments
Those “female-stereotyped traits” – soft skills – can be trained. Physical strength less so, and it has a hard limit, of which is generally and significantly lower for women.
a reductive set of traits (physical strength evaluated through strict fitness tests, for example) that serve to maintain white men’s dominance
“Fitnesses tests” are biased against black men? She’s going to have an uphill battle pushing that fantasy.
64% of calls for firefighters are triggered by medical emergencies
Which does not mean that firefighters actually address the medical emergencies. In my experience, the firemen answer calls so that someone can break into the place where the emergency is. The purely medical types don’t generally lug around axes and ladders and such hardware.
343 FDNY Firemen died on 9/11. Not because there were no females in the department, but because when it came time to gear up, only men climbed those 70 stories to fight the fires.
If you lack the physical strength to carry an unconscious smoke-inhalation victim down all the flights of stairs to the ground floor, no one cares what superior soft compassionate skills you were unable to demonstrate after you both died in the stairwell.
How dare there be physical strength requirements for a job that requires physical strength?
Memo for Professor Corinne Bendersky:
No one caught in a burning building gives a s**t about the gender or race of the person who dashes in to save them.
Oh, great!
They are going to start hiring firefighters based on feelings and skin color, not aptitude for the job.
Yay!
Libtards are so smart!
I wonder how many black males are professors of diversity? Or can only white people see color.
Will make sure that when the good professors house is on fire, that we only send petite female firefighters.