Interesting (video, 0:15). Why, you might well ask, was the female “firefighter” not carrying a ladder to the wall, when her male colleague was? Is it understood that in the event of a real fire, only the men will carry ladders? And what will happen if an all-female crew turns up? Will they just watch the building(s) burn down? Of course there never are all-female crews.
One final question. Why is there no gender pay gap in firefighting?
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Of course it was never the case that any man who turned up could be a fireman. It was only those who met the criteria. Criteria set by the demands of the job. The first stage of getting women into such services was to have different criteria for women. But of course this was challenged on the grounds of sex discrimination because the much lower criteria could be met by many more men who were excluded by the male criteria. Which meant that either both men and women had to be tested by the same standards or the lower standards for women had to become the standards for all. In effect the job had to change because the service couldn’t claim any higher standard were required to do the job. So the fire services no longer advise that disabled people or older people have a refuge area where they await rescue, because “firefighters” are no longer expected to carry heavy loads (there were lots of helpful rescue services we used to call on the fire services to do that suddenly stopped). And in the Police we see the stories of 6 officers turning up for simple arrests etc. Again because size and health standards have fallen. As you say in reality such services do have to “choose” some people ( of the male variety) who meet the current standards and considerably exceed them so that they do have a reasonable number of big guys. And these inevitably end up having to do more or at least the really hard or dangerous stuff. This double standard and illusion of equality then breeds distrust and cynicism, dangerous in roles dependent on teamwork. The humour about this then becomes “misogyny” with results like the whole of the Welsh Fire services are labelled “, misogynistic”. Our vital public services corroded from within by their own dissembling.
Dissembling easy to see when at the same time separate women’s sports are shown to exist only because women would never win if they were mixed!
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