Women holding the line: a reflection on women in fire, rescue and emergency response

Women's Month came and went in August, and I let it pass without saying much. That was on purpose. The month fills up fast with campaigns, and I did not want to add one more graphic to the pile and then move on as if the subject were seasonal. So I waited. Now that the noise has quieted, I want to talk properly about the women who work in one of the hardest, least forgiving fields there is: fire, rescue and emergency medical care.

I am Linda, and I have spent years getting training resources into the hands of the people who run toward the things the rest of us run away from. That work has given me a particular vantage point. I do not fight fires. I help make sure the people who do can learn their craft properly. And from where I sit, the question of who gets to walk through that door still matters enormously.

How many women actually work in fire, rescue and EMS?

Fewer than most people assume. In the United States, women make up about 9 percent of all firefighters, and only around 5 percent of career firefighters, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in its US Fire Department Profile. That figure has barely moved in a generation.

EMS, which stands for Emergency Medical Services, the ambulance and pre-hospital care side of the industry, looks a little healthier. Research on the US emergency medical workforce published in JACEP Open found the share of women rose from roughly 31 percent in 2011 to about 35 percent in 2019. Better, though women still hold far fewer of the senior leadership roles. So even where women are present in numbers, they thin out sharply on the way up.

I lead with these figures not to be gloomy, but because you cannot fix a gap you refuse to measure.

What actually keeps women out?

It is rarely one big wall. It is a series of smaller ones.

The first is a myth about physical standards, the idea that this is simply a man's body doing a man's job. Strength and fitness matter, of course, and nobody is arguing for a lowered bar on a burning roof. But the field is far broader than raw lifting power. It rewards stamina, technique, composure and clear thinking under pressure, and those are not male traits.

The second wall is more literal, and it frustrates me every time it comes up. For decades, PPE, meaning Personal Protective Equipment, the turnout gear, helmets, gloves and boots that keep a responder alive, was designed around the male body. Women were handed smaller versions of kit cut from men's patterns. Research shared by the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) found that roughly 80 percent of women in the fire service report ill-fitting gear, about four times the rate reported by men. That is not a comfort issue. Gear that gaps or bunches restricts movement, adds fatigue and leaves openings where embers and heat get in. Ask a woman to do a dangerous job in equipment that was never shaped for her, then wonder aloud why retention is poor.

The third wall is the quietest: visibility. It is genuinely harder to picture yourself in a role you have never seen a woman hold. Culture, mentorship and simply being seen do a great deal of the heavy lifting here.

What is South Africa getting right?

More than we give ourselves credit for. Our Working on Fire programme reports that around 29 percent of its beneficiaries are women, which the programme describes as among the highest levels of any comparable fire service in the world. Roughly a quarter of the firefighters selected for the 2024 deployment that South Africa sent to help fight wildfires in Canada were women. And the Western Cape has seen the launch of the Juliet Crew, reported as the country's first all-female firefighting team, many of them women from disadvantaged backgrounds stepping into a role their communities had never offered them before.

I mention it because progress feels possible when you can see it happening close to home, not imported from somewhere else.

Why does training access matter so much for women in this field?

Because confidence in an emergency is built long before the emergency arrives. It is built in the drill, the repetition, the safe space to get it wrong and try again.

This is where good training tools earn their place. Modern simulation, including VR, meaning Virtual Reality, where a trainee practises a realistic scenario in a controlled digital environment, lets someone face a fire, a rescue or a hazardous-materials (hazmat) incident again and again without real-world danger. Hazmat covers the chemical, biological and other dangerous substances responders are trained to handle safely. For a woman entering a field where she may already feel she has more to prove, the chance to practise until the response is second nature is not a luxury. It is how you walk in steady.

Access is the word I keep coming back to. When quality training resources only reach a handful of well-funded centres, the people already on the margins are the first to be left out. Widen the access, and you widen who gets to belong.

Where does SkillsTrain fit into this?

Honestly? In the background, and I am comfortable there.

SkillsTrain does not deliver the courses or certify anyone. We are a distributor. We supply training providers with strong resources, from established fire and EMS course materials to immersive simulation tools, so that the people doing the actual teaching have better instruments to work with. When a training provider can offer richer, more realistic preparation, more people get to train well, and that includes more women.

I will admit a quiet pride in doing this as a woman-led business. Being recognised as a Top Women business in 2025, and more recently by MEA Markets as Best VR-Focused Fire and Rescue Training Specialists in 2026, matters to me mostly because of what it signals to the next woman weighing up whether this industry has room for her. It does. I am proof of one version of that, and the firefighters, paramedics and rescue technicians I get to support are proof of another.

Women's Month is behind us for another year. The women holding the line are not seasonal. Neither is the work of making room for them.

Editorial note: this is a reflection, not a recruitment brochure. Every figure here is drawn from a named public source and credited where it appears.