In one sense, Rebecca “Becky” Lemanski was carrying on a family tradition when she started classes at San Antonio College’s Regional Fire Academy in 2017. Lemanski’s grandfather, father and brother were volunteer firefighters.
But in another sense, she was blazing a trail — or trying to.
Women make up just 8 percent of the nation’s 1.1 million firefighters, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
Lemanski cannot recall encountering a female firefighter in her hometown in South Carolina.
“I want to be that role model for little girls,” said Lemanski, 31. “I want them to look at me and go, ‘Oh, she’s doing it, I can do it, too,’ because I didn’t have that, really, growing up.”
Lemanski currently works one 48-hour shift a week at the Kirby Fire Department, but she aspires to work for a department in a larger city, like San Antonio or Austin.
But there’s an obstacle in Lemanski’s path:the Candidate Physical Ability Test, a nationally standardized assessment of physical fitness. While the Kirby Fire Department does not require candidates to pass the CPAT, most others do.
In major metropolitan areas such as San Antonio, candidates must score well on a written exam, pass the CPAT and withstand an extensive vetting process that could include a polygraph, a background check, a psychological evaluation and an interview with the fire chief before they are eligible to enter cadet training. Once they complete training, they are considered “probationary firefighters,” one step below full-fledged firefighters.
Becky Lemanski, 31, center, listens as paramedic Angela Nagel speaks during a 48-hour shift with the Kirby Fire Department on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
Becky Lemanski, 31, suits up during a bunker drill with the Kirby Fire Department on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
Kirby Fire Department engineer, Becky Lemanski, 31, checks a laptop with incoming calls on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
Kirby Fire Department engineer, Becky Lemanski, 31, goes over material during a 48-hour shift on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
Becky Lemanski, 31, controls the pump on a fire truck as the crew runs drills starts a 48-hour shift with the Kirby Fire Department on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
The CPAT is composed of a series of eight sequential events. Each one mimics a strenuous task often performed by firefighters: climbing stairs, breaching walls, dragging hoses, propping ladders against roofs and windowsills, hauling a victim or an incapacitated colleague to safety. To pass, candidates must complete every event to the proctors’ satisfaction within 10 minutes and 20 seconds.
Candidates are allowed two attempts per annual hiring cycle. Those who fail both times have to start from scratch the next year.
“It’s tough for everyone,” Lemanski said of the CPAT. But, she added, “I do think it’s probably tougher for women.”
Hiring statistics seem to reflect her observations.
Nearly 95 percent of the 1,736 firefighters in the San Antonio Fire Department are men.
Valerie Frausto, assistant chief of administrative services, is the highest-ranking woman in the department. Like Lemanski, she has relatives who fight fires for a living, including several cousins and a brother-in-law.
Frausto, 47, said she always wanted a job in which she could “help people and not be confined to an office,” but firefighting did not initially seem like an option.
“It was just a nontraditional career choice for females,” she said.
Her feelings changed when she took some informational materials from a female recruiter at a mall one day in late 1998. Leafing through the pages, Frausto, who was studying for a degree in clinical laboratory science at San Antonio College and Our Lady of the Lake University, realized firefighting would satisfy her desire for meaningful work much more than testing blood ever could.
“Seeing a female firefighter is what made me think that it was a real possibility,” she said.
Kirby Fire Department engineer Becky Lemanski’s helmet rests on a fire truck on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
Surrounded by guys
Frausto entered the San Antonio Fire Department Academy as one of three women in a class of 47 cadets. Today, 21 years after she graduated, she is the only female member of the department’s command staff.
While Frausto is emphatic her gender never made her a target, there were subtle reminders of her status. Her first pair of boots had to be specially made because the supplier did not keep sizes that small — a woman’s 7 — in stock then.
“I still to this day get people that say, ‘Well, how should I refer to you? Are you a firelady, a firewoman?’ I’m like, ‘Uh, firefighter.’ And then, just accidentally in conversation, I’ll have firefighters say, ‘Yes, sir,’ just because that’s what they’re used to dealing with on a daily basis. It’s very seldom that they deal with women because there’s very few in the department,” she said.
For her part, Lemanski praised her male colleagues in Kirby, though she acknowledged, “it can be intimidating going into work knowing that you’re surrounded by six guys all day, every day.”
“It’s not easy, that’s for sure,” she conceded. “But I’m lucky I work with a bunch of men that treat me fairly equal. There is always that doubt in the back of my mind of being able to keep up and pull my own weight, but they are encouraging and always willing to help me out.”
That said, Lemanski cautioned that her experience is not necessarily representative of that of other female firefighters.
“I know of women that have had to file (complaints) throughout the country,” she said.
She also recalled older instructors at the fire academy expressing sexist views.
One “was very old school in the sense that (he thought) the three women in the class didn’t belong there, and he was not shy about stating that fact,” she said.
But Lemanski believes the tide is turning.
“This newer generation is much more accepting of us,” she said. “For them, I’m just a firefighter on the truck.”
Still, more than four decades after the SAFD went co-ed in 1979, the department, like many others across the country, has a long way to go.
On average, 281 men and 32 women took the physical ability test annually in San Antonio from 2015 to 2021. Of those, an average of 94 percent, about 263, of the men and 63 percent, about 20, of the women passed.
Fire Chief Charles Hood is actively taking steps to recruit women and other minorities.
“It’s my belief that our firefighters and our apparatus … ought to be representative of the community that it serves,” he said.
‘No hero without her’
One of Hood’s initiatives is the #HeroLikeHer program. Marketed with the catchy tagline, “There is no hero without her,” the program’s nucleus is a summer camp for girls ages 6 to 17 that covers a range of basic skills: how to perform CPR, how to execute a rescue, how to investigate an arson case.
“Everything is being taught by one of our female firefighters, paramedics or officers,” Hood said. “We want that visual for our children, and we want them to understand that it’s something that they can attain down the road.”
In addition to running the summer camp, the #HeroLikeHer program hosts special events and provides mentoring and shadowing opportunities in the hopes of changing “that mindset in young women that ‘firefighters are boys’” said Joe Arrington, SAFD spokesman.
Frausto, who helps develop diversity, equity and inclusion programs for the department, said the percentage of women firefighters as of Sept. 1 — 5.1 percent — is much higher than when she was starting.
Becky Lemanski, 31, explains the pump system on a fire truck to first year firefighter, Abel Mendez, 21, during a 48-hour shift with the Kirby Fire Department on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
“Definitely, within the course of my career, I have seen the numbers increase,” she said. But, she added, “I don’t necessarily think that it has to do specifically with #HeroLikeHer. … I think it’s just the combination of a different time and different culture, different generation.”
However, a shortage of potential female recruits is not the only barrier standing in the way of integration.
Lemanski said the CPAT disproportionately trips up women, especially shorter women. She is 5 foot 11 but has failed the test five times, foiling her plans to pursue a firefighting career at a larger department.
The first of the CPAT’s eight events is by far the most challenging for Lemanski. In San Antonio, it entails climbing a stepmill for three minutes straight while wearing a 50-pound vest and carrying two 12.5-pound weights intended to approximate the physical burden of protective clothing and a high-rise pack, respectively. The vest is worn for the entirety of the CPAT.
The physical test is a challenge for many of her peers as well.
“Statistically, the pass rate isn’t as great (for females) as for males,” Frausto said.
Frausto entered the fire service shortly before the CPAT replaced the Cooper Test in the early 2000s. She had no problems passing the Cooper Test, which involves completing a minimum number of sit-ups and push-ups and running 1.5 miles within a specific time frame.
The CPAT “is a lot more challenging than the Cooper Test,” she said. But, like Lemanski, she found the stepmill event especially difficult.
Lemanski feels disheartened by her poor results thus far. Until recently, three of the Kirby department’s handful of full-time firefighters were women, she said. However, she is now the only one because her two female colleagues departed at the end of September. In contrast, 88 of the San Antonio department’s 1,736 firefighters were women as of Sept. 1.
“It is frustrating to not pass … when I know I can and do actually perform well on the job,” Lemanski said.
Ken Lemanski, Rebecca Lemanski’s father, encouraged his daughter to become a firefighter because of the emphasis on teamwork. But he said it has been hard for him to watch his child struggle so hard to meet her goals.
“As a father that’s got a daughter who wants to improve herself, I’m concerned,” he said.
One potential solution could be reformatting the CPAT to provide longer breaks between each of the eight events, which would allow candidates more time to recover from exertion, according to Ken Lemanski.
“Because you’re more interested in if they can do that skill than how fast they can do it,” he explained.
He said the test is more challenging than basic fieldwork because it requires firefighters to complete each task continuously, rather than periodically, and individually, rather than as part of a team.
“Granted, running up a flight of stairs, you’re doing that by yourself, regardless, but if you’re pulling a bunch of hose up 10 flights of stairs or whatever, you’re going to have people helping you do that. So why are (people having to pull a bunch of hose by themselves) on the CPAT?” he said.
Female mentors
To boost the passing rate for women, Arrington, the SAFD spokesman, said candidates have the opportunity to meet with female firefighters in the department before the test.
“They are mentored on preparing and training to pass the exam,” Arrington said.
Rebecca Lemanski recalled attending what she called a “women’s meeting” for female candidates who had done well on the written exam.
“If you obviously had a potential shot at moving on … they invited you out to the academy to meet with women firefighters to pick their brains and find out what the job is like as a female because, obviously, it is very male-dominated,” she said.
That, she added, was “what I’ve noticed San Antonio does better than some of the other places.”
Kirby Fire Department engineer, Becky Lemanski, speaks with shift captain John Speed on Sept. 15. Lemanski is in her third year with the department. The fire department is working on increasing gender diversity within its ranks, which are currently overwhelmingly male.
Jerry Lara /Staff photographer
Gender parity is likely out of the question, according to Frausto.
“I think it’s always going to be a male-dominant career, and that’s just because of it being physically demanding. It’s a very tough job, tough career, especially for those with family,” she said.
Lemanski doesn’t necessarily think the CPAT should be reformatted to accommodate women better.
“I don’t want the standards changed for us because then we’ll get looked down on and talked bad about,” she said.
But she does think departments should strive to increase the number of women they hire.
“It’s kind of a Catch-22. Change the standards, but don’t change the standards,” she said.
Lemanski said diversity could serve two critical purposes: improving quality of care and dispelling culturally entrenched sexism by teaching both girls and boys that no one line of work is off-limits to them.
“There’s been plenty of times where the patient is a woman, and they would rather talk to me versus talking to my male partner,” Lemanski said.
Sexual assault victims might express such a preference. In addition, Lemanski said female patients might ask that a female medic or firefighter perform certain medical procedures — attaching electrodes to the chest to monitor the heart’s electrical activity, for example.
She is considering starting the testing process for the sixth time next spring.
caroline.tien@hearst.com