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,...
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