It’s Okay That We Don’t Have More Female Firefighters

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

 

Over the last devastating week of wildfires, there are many things that we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs — and more women firefighters isn’t one of them.

 

This isn’t to slight the contribution of female LAFD personnel who are out there giving it their all in dangerous conditions, but to note that of all the phenomena that don’t care about race and gender, a rampaging inferno must top the list.

 

Either someone is there to try to extinguish the flames, with adequate resources (including working hydrants), or not.

 

Nonetheless, Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters, as if gender diversity somehow makes it easier to rescue people and put out fires.

 

Back in 2022, then-mayor Eric Garcetti announced the Los Angeles Fire Department’s “first-ever Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Bureau,” focused “on building and fostering a Department committed to engaging the voices and respecting the humanity of all its members, reflected in how it handles recruitment and hiring, workplace conduct, retention, and promotion.”

 

It’s not clear how the LAFD “respecting the humanity” of its employees was going to help fight fires, nor is it clear that anyone who crafted or celebrated this initiative particularly cared.

 

In a widely mocked public relations video from 2019 that emerged during L.A.’s catastrophe, the head of the department’s diversity bureau, Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, said that if she’s not strong enough to lift a man out of burning building, well, “he got himself in the wrong place.” Perhaps the hypothetical man injured in a fire and needing lifesaving assistance will make better choices next time.

 

Larson also maintained that people want to see someone responding to an emergency who “looks like you,” although the vast majority of people simply want someone who is responsive and competent.

 

Surely, if a Filipino immigrant’s house was saved by the LAFD in recent days, the homeowner didn’t say, “Oh, thank goodness — but I hope at least one Pacific Islander was part of the crew.”

 

LAFD’s focus on recruiting women hasn’t exactly produced stunning results. An article in the Los Angeles Times back in 2020 noted that Mayor Garcetti took office in 2013 when women made up 2.9 percent of the force, and the percentage had increased all the way to 3.3 percent. According to a LAFD report, the number had risen to 3.6 percent by the beginning of 2022.

 

Across the U.S. about 5 percent of professional firefighters are women.

 

Is this a problem? There is no reason to believe that it’s more of a problem than the disproportionately male make-up of other hazardous, physically taxing jobs.

 

Men are 96 percent of loggers, 99 percent of fishers and hunters, and 97.1 percent of roofers. Of the top ten most dangerous jobs in America, the lowest percentage of men is in refuse collection, at 87.9 percent.

 

As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute points out, men accounted for 91.4 percent of workplace fatalities in 2021. Is that a violation of social justice?

 

In contrast, women dominate in less hazardous professions like office and administrative support, teaching and library work, and health care.

 

These different occupational tendencies don’t make men and women better or worse than one another — just different. We don’t “need” more female loggers any more than we “need” more male librarians (although, obviously, everyone should be welcomed and treated with respect so long as he or she can do the work).

 

Camille Paglia, the great critic, wrote years ago, “It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments.”

 

And, she might have added, putting out fires. That’s only a problem for people who have let a hothouse ideological agenda obscure common sense regarding an absolutely essential function of government.