Female Firefighters:
A Status Report

One of the many functions of Women in the Fire Service is to maintain current statistics on the numbers of women in firefighting. We have been researching and compiling this data for more than twenty years, and are the only agency in the U.S. to do so.

This report covers suppression-trained women in the U.S. with career-level positions in structural firefighting (or, in the case of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a combination of structural and wildland firefighting). It does not include volunteer firefighters, who are so numerous and spread out over so many thousands of fire departments that we would only be able to track them if each state collected its own data ­ which most do not. It also does not include wildland firefighters (other than those in CDF); we hope to improve our data collection in that area and eventually provide a comparable status report for that sector of the fire service.

The total number of female firefighters and officers included in our current data is 5,855. Adding a conservative 5% to account for women not included in these statistics gives a current estimate of some 6,150 women active in career-level structural fire suppression in the U.S.

Following is a state-by-state breakdown of the data, including the number of female firefighters in each state and the number who have been promoted to engineer, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and chief. As a convenient shorthand, "chief" in the listings below designates any level of district chief, battalion chief, deputy chief, assistant chief, etc., while women at the top level of their department are listed separately as "chief of department." Where a disproportionate number of the women in a particular state work for a very few fire departments, that is also indicated.

It should be noted that because different fire departments and different regions vary in their rank structures, exact comparisons are misleading. Some fire departments do not use the rank of captain; some others, particularly in California, do not have lieutenants. A captain, therefore, might be an engine company officer, a ladder company officer, or a station commander supervising one or more lieutenants.

Following the state listings are summaries of the numbers of women officers, the top five states in terms of number of women firefighters, a list of fire departments with the highest percentages of women firefighters, and a list of the ten largest U.S. fire departments that employ no women firefighters at all.

WFS' data collection is always a work in progress. We gather it in many different ways: from our contacts with fire chiefs, from newspaper articles and press releases, and -- most importantly -- from our members and friends. We hope publishing this report will encourage WFS' members and supporters to continue to help us update the information and keep it as current and accurate as possible.

Top states by number of women firefighters

California: 1297
Florida: 775
Texas: 324
Maryland: 249
Virginia: 234

Urban fire departments (more than 75 career personnel) with the highest percentages of women firefighters

Minneapolis, Minnesota: 16%
Madison, Wisconsin: 15%
San Francisco: 15%
Boulder, Colorado: 14%
Miami Dade County, Florida: 13%
Several other departments have percentages of women firefighters in the 9 - 11% range.

Largest fire departments with no women firefighters

Jersey City, New Jersey
Yonkers, New York
Elizabeth, New Jersey
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Paterson, New Jersey
Bayonne, New Jersey
Garden Grove, California
Allentown, Pennsylvania