Fire Captain Michele Richards sits across from me in an office at the firehouse on the grounds of NASA Ames Research Center, just an hour down the 101 freeway from San Francisco. Of the thirteen men on her crew, one opens the door every so often to use the office where I’m conducting our interview. “Oh, sorry,” they say, which doesn’t faze Richards, who just smiles and says, “No worries,” to her co-workers before turning back to explain what life is like working as the only women at the firehouse day in and out.
“I still have to find my comfort level, my boundary, being a woman, and being one of the guys. It’s not a matter of fitting in, but it’s appreciating those similarities and those differences.”
She goes on to describe a day when she had come back to work after having dressed for a wedding she was attending because she had forgotten something in her locker.
“I had on a dress, make-up, the whole thing. I rang the doorbell. One of my firefighters came to the door and said, ‘May I help you?’ He had no clue of who I was. That’s an issue that I struggle with wanting to be one of the guys, yet retaining my femaleness, there’s a real balance there.”
It hasn’t happened overnight, finding that balance or even the progression of women in the field. Richards’ move to California three years ago for the captain position at NASA Ames’ firehouse was pivotal in order to advance her career, which spans a full twenty-two years in the fire service.
“For me back in 1985, I was one of the first women on my department. Certainly as a female and coming on twenty-some years ago, it was a challenge because you know as a female you have to give one-hundred and twenty percent, especially in a male-dominated field where you’re really being watched. It seemed like every progression from firefighter to engineer apparatus operator that was a promotion, to lieutenant, to captain, I still had to prove myself. Certainly the older individuals on the department when the women first came on, no matter what I did, it wasn’t going to be good enough. I was breaking into that sacred sanctuary of that male-dominated field and they were very unhappy, especially that I could do the job.”
“As I progressed and as these older firefighters retired and as individuals worked with me and saw that I could do the job and liked my management style, but as far as upper-management leadership, there was still that glass ceiling. I had made captain there [in Topeka, Kansas] and had applied numerous times for promotions into battalion chief, assistant chief type positions, and was passed over for individuals that were white males, with twenty-eight years on that had high school educations and that had really done nothing to prepare themselves for the position. I had spent $30,000 for my education, took all these extra classes, and really worked to prepare myself for that promotion and that advancement to be passed up time again. I didn’t want to sit around for another fifteen years waiting my turn to be chief, so I said, ‘You know what? It’s time to go.’”
Captain Richards picked up her life and moved west where she watched a progressive movement burn the edges of what had typically been a male-dominated field.
“I think in the fire service, they’re beginning to understand that your fire service organization needs to mirror your community and that kind of diversity. It’s not just the big six-foot-four, 200 pound guys, the bull in the china kind of thing, going in and kicking the doors. It’s much different now because of fire protection systems and we don’t have a lot of fires. I can get into smaller places, cubbyholes, up in attic spaces, and a lot of the calls are much more EMS-related. We still fight fires and women have to be up to that level to be strong enough, physically fit. For me, it’s always been the challenge of doing things a little bit differently. Women are much stronger in their legs, so how I lift things and I’m shorter, so how I may get a tool off may be very different from my male counterpart, but I get the job done. I think the big thing is that I know if somebody goes down inside, I know what to do to be able to drag them out. Whether I have to grab and pull instead of lifting them over my shoulder, I’m going to get that male counterpart out because I’ve trained and I’ve exercised and I have the physical capacity to do that. We go in and we fight fires and we have black snot coming out of our nose, you have to have that ability to do that.”
