Diversity and the Department: The FDNY Recruitment Battle

Firefighter Wilson is the "senior man" at Engine 219 in Brooklyn. So, at a fire, Wilson handles the nozzle—a tough job for any member of the FDNY. But Firefighter Wilson is not like most FDNY members, because Firefighter Wilson is not a man. So, unlike her male colleagues, if the facepiece on her breathing apparatus breaks, the spare units that battalion chiefs carry are unlikely to fit her smaller face.

As a black woman, 12-year FDNY veteran Regina Wilson embodies two separate, decades-old and ongoing battles over how the fire department is staffed. In the early 1970s, black firefighters went to federal court claiming that the FDNY's hiring practices illegally discriminated on the basis of race. They won, forcing the FDNY to use a strict 3-to-1, white-to-minority hiring ratio for several years. Later that decade, women who wanted to fight fires sued over the department's physical screening. They won too.

After the latter court ruling, the city changed its physical test and hired 41 female firefighters. But now there are only 29 women among the 11,000 people who wear FDNY uniforms—a fraction of 1 percent. By comparison, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., 24 percent of the fire department is female.

Meanwhile, the presence of racial and ethnic minorities in the FDNY—in 2007 about 3.4 percent of firefighters were black and 6.7 percent Latino—lags behind other cities, like Los Angeles, where the LAFD is 30 percent Latino, and Chicago, whose firefighting force is 20 percent black.

The Vulcan Association of black firefighters sued the city in 2007 alleging that the written exams used by the FDNY in 1999 and 2003 discriminated against blacks and Latinos. Ninety percent of whites passed the '99 test, compared with 60 percent of blacks and 77 percent of Latinos. The numbers improved dramatically with the 2003 test, with 97 percent of whites, 85 percent of blacks and 93 percent of Latinos passing—but among those who passed, blacks and Hispanics tended to be ranked lower than whites, so that of the 5,300 firefighters hired from both exams, only 184 were black and 461 Latino.

In 2010, federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that the 1999 and 2003 exams had illegally discriminated, because they had an obvious disparate impact on minorities and because the city had—in the judge's view—not demonstrated a firm link between the test and the actual requirements of a firefighter's job.

After a stepped-up recruitment campaign, a far higher number of blacks and Hispanics took the most recent FDNY test in 2007, and minorities made up a third of those whose scores were high enough to make hiring likely. The number of women who passed increased by half.

But Garaufis said that test was also poorly designed and stopped the city from using its results. The two sides recently agreed that a new firefighter test will be given later this year, but they still need to come together on the test questions.

Wilson took her exam in 1992 but wasn't hired until seven years later. When she graduated from the fire academy and began at her first firehouse, "It wasn't bad," she says. "They didn't treat me bad. I think they were kind of afraid of me as well as me being afraid of them."

A recent report by the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services estimated that on the basis of the number of women in other blue-collar professions, in the absence of discrimination, 17 percent of firefighters would be women. Wilson would settle for 500, or even 100, at the FDNY but adds, "In my time on the job we might not even see the original 41."