Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 6, 1993                   TAG: 9311240274
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FIREFIGHTING IS WOMEN'S WORK

Too few have applied for jobs, to be sure. But part of the answer may be a less-than-vigorous effort to recruit women firefighters.

The work can be dangerous; it does require heavy lifting. But it is not men's work alone. There is no good reason why affirmative action to sexually integrate fire departments has come even more slowly than for racial integration.

There's rarely a shortage of male applicants for firefighter jobs, as there often is for jobs at police departments.

Roanoke city, for instance, had 270 applicants for a handful of vacant firefighter jobs this year. Only four of the applicants were women, and none ranked high enough in a series of demanding physical and written tests to get a job.

Thus, the department remains male only.

Are the tests, particularly the physical tests, gender biased against women?

Deneen Adams, who has tried for three years to become the city's first woman firefighter, doesn't think so. Interviewed recently by our staff writer, Stephen Foster, she termed the tests fair.

Others did also - including Dean Paderick, area supervisor for the state's Department of Fire Programs.

The requirements have been modified over the years "from real macho-type testing basically to agility testing" and they are relevant to firefighters' duties and the circumstances in which they often find themselves, Paderick said.

And, indeed, few would argue that the tests ought to be softened up or dumbed down for women - not when lives, including women firefighters' lives, may depend on the standards now being tested.

Still, as Mayor David Bowers says, the city's fire department can make a greater effort to hire women without diminishing its ability to save lives or property.

Affirmative action in this case may require a gender-specific public- relations and educational campaign - with firefighters going into schools and girls' phys-ed classes, or home-ec classes.

It might require going the extra mile in recruitment efforts - before girls' and women's clubs, for instance.

As Brenda Berkman, president of the national Women in Fire Suppression, says, "Most young girls are not even aware that the fire department is a career option. It's not sufficient just to post a notice in a civil-service type of publication."

Roanoke, of course, isn't the only place where the fire department is viewed as a male bastion. Nationally, says Berkman, less than 1 percent of paid firefighters are women.

More than in many places, though, Roanoke officials seem to be more responsive to the need to change the fire department's image and make-up. That's to their credit. Now comes the follow-through, and it has to be sustained.