Richards shared about an incident that only a woman might understand. When she and her crew answered a call about a SIDS baby that died, she got on the scene and realized there was nothing they could do. Richards believes that in being a woman, she was able to add solace to a mother’s devastation.
“I was holding the baby in one arm, and I was holding the two and half year old sibling in the other and in between the two I was holding the mom. We were all standing there crying, and I looked around and my male crew was gone, they were nowhere to be seen. That was the best you could do. You could be there with that person in that time and you could grieve with them. That’s a gift that she [the mother] will always remember, that somebody was there with her.”
However, society doesn’t always recognize the multi-tasking talents of women and their ability to bring a little bit of heart to the job. Richards says they’re still surprised when she busts out of a burning building.
“I think it’s no matter how hard we try, especially in any male-dominated field, it’s going to be a challenge of how we’re perceived. Still to this day, and actually, right before I left Topeka Fire Department in Kansas, we had a house fire. When I’m in full uniform with my bunker pants and my helmet and my face mask and everything, you can’t tell if I’m a man or a woman. So it was a small kitchen fire, I had come out. It was hot, I had come out on the porch, walked down to the sidewalk, and I started taking my gear off. When I got my helmet, my mask, and everything off, there was a crowd there and one of the women said, ‘Look, it’s a woman!’ Like, ‘It’s a woman … I’ve never seen one!’ And I had been on eighteen years. So still there’s that perception even within the community.”
I wondered if the same were true back at the firehouse, within her all-male crew back in Kansas or here at NASA. How did she relate to the men that were her crew that she had to manage on the off days during training or on the scene of a fire or emergency? Richards explained that as a gay woman, she didn’t find any friction between her and her male counterparts, but she did speak about the sexual tension that could occur between the sexes.
