00:00I am from Florida and eventually I want to be a smoke trumper.
00:04I'm here fighting fire to get into public information or into a helicopter.
00:13Step one of being a firefighter, have wet stuff. Step two, have hot stuff.
00:23Step three, put wet stuff on hot stuff.
00:30I started in fire with the BLM in Bale in 2006 as a dispatcher. In 2009, I fought fire for the
00:48summer. When I would go to meetings, I was usually alone when it comes to females. I had another
00:55female come to me that I was working with a co-worker at the time with this letter that
00:58she thought was really funny and it turns out what it is was actually a journaling from another
01:05female on a fire crew that was having a really hard time with her male co-workers. They were
01:11making fun of her for how she looked and when I was reading that letter, I thought it was heartbreaking.
01:21The PBS NewsHour has spoken to 34 women across 13 states who claim they've experienced gender
01:27discrimination, sexual harassment, and in some cases, sexual assault and rape in the U.S. Forest
01:33Service. The agency provides protections for its offenders, often promoting them while the victims
01:41are shattered, left behind, and nowhere to turn. But one of the things that I realized after reading
01:46that letter is that I needed to stand up for all of us, not just myself, and try to figure
01:50out a way where now that I was getting up through the ranks, how I could turn around and pull women
01:55with me. Women from all over the country, I've had them as far as Alaska and Hawaii, come in and dip
02:08their toes in firefighting and see if it's something that they like. We cover very personal
02:13topics. When you're living in a male-dominated workforce, it's kind of hard to explain to the
02:17guy that you've been hanging out with for five days without a shower that you just got your period
02:22or it's really intimidating to people out there that have never camped before that sometimes you
02:28just don't know how to poop in the middle of the forest. We can't get over those little hurdles
02:38and we can't talk about really important things like widow makers that could fall and kill you
02:44or getting burned over or, you know, any of those other firefighting hazards that are way more
02:49important than trying to figure out where to put your used tampon.
03:04That also means that you're away from your family for two weeks at a time. Just because you have a
03:08baby doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be the one that ends up in that really rural kind of
03:12guard station. Like, we could make things a little easier if we wanted to. One of the problems, too,
03:16is that women aren't applying for these jobs. When you see it in the movies and you see it
03:21on coasters, very rarely do you see women out there on the fire line. And if you have a little
03:26girl that's looking at trying to make a career out of her life, she's never going to see herself
03:31as a firefighter because they're never ever represented that way. But if we don't have any
03:41women that stay in long enough to get into management, then we don't have any women in
03:45the boardroom when all of these decisions are being made. And we end up with a lot of decisions
03:51that might not have been thought all the way through.
04:05MINE is not the only program in the country. In the last four or five years, trying to get a more
04:10diverse workforce within the fire has been a priority for the BLM and the Forest Service.
04:15We're willing to bring you on with zero experience. We're happy to give you all the
04:20training that you need. You can take this job and potentially turn it into a career where you're
04:26making way more than minimum wage.
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