Tag Archives: women

Your efforts to recruit and retain women for your department are doomed to fail if you don't have those policies and procedures in place now. If every one of your male officers and firefighters aren't informed and educated about how a female colleague will be treated when she finds out she's pregnant, your efforts are doomed to fail.

Treating and recovering from a brain that's been injured through post traumatic stress (PTS) or PTSD is unlike that for a physical injury that's visible to the world. Former firefighter and PTSD sufferer/survivor Nathalie Michaud writes about here continuing journey.

Come again? Without admitting guilt? I don’t know about the average citizen, but when I see a local government paying $1.75 million to a plaintiff in a sexual harassment case, I see “guilty”, how about you?

Today's firefighters face a multitude of situations daily that require knowledge, skills, and abilities far beyond those required to fight fires, provide medical care and rescue entrapped victims. Many of those situations require skills more akin to a social worker than that of a firefighter.

We can change the culture in the fire service, but not through solutions like policy or procedure or training or lawsuits. The change must come from the “majority stakeholders” in the fire service: Men. Men must take responsibility and ownership for the problems we face in the fire service. And right now, they must also take responsibility for seeking and implementing the solutions.

So how do we in the fire service become better at recognizing that one of our own is “drowning”? How do we get better at asking for help? How do we get better at providing help?

I, for one, am growing very tired of words like, "wrestling, grappling, struggling, etc.", being used to describe the misogynist attitudes that still exist in too many fire departments four decades after some of the first female firefighters came on the job.

I’m seeing more postings on social media platforms, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, promoting social media infographicfirefighter employment opportunities in various locations around the USA and Canada. That’s a good thing, for sure, because if people don’t even know about the opportunities that are out there…but I don’t think that using social media to promote job announcements is any kind of “silver bullet” for fire service organizations looking to attract quality people to their “tribe.”

By: Nathalie Michaud After I received the diagnosis of my PTSD in late Summer 2014, I was partly relieved because now I knew why I felt and thought the way I did. It didn’t make it any easier to accept, but now that there was a name for it, a bit of the “ET” syndrome went away. I had choices: ...

With a clearance from the doctors and a personal determination to return to work earlier this year, things were looking up for Nathalie until her employer decided they did not want to risk taking her back and abruptly terminated her employment cutting off all income and support. How shameful is that?