A recent (May 12) UPI piece asserts that “ONLY 4% of U.S. firefighters are female, despite almost half of female firefighter candidates passing physical ability tests,” according to their cited study.
In EVERY locale in this country Fire and Police Departments give standardized written and physical exams to create “eligibles lists,” from which to choose their workers.
Thousands of the tens of thousands of applicants who take those exams, pass those exams, but only the hundreds of candidates at or near the top of those lists, based on those competitive exams have any chance of being hired.
In point of FACT, thousands, probably tens of thousands more men pass those exams and do not make the “eligibles lists” then women, but no one seems to be shedding a tear for them.
No one has yet made an argument that such competitive exams create “an undue barrier against women and some ethnic minorities.”
Disparate impact has been discredited in the courts as a “measurement of discrimination.” The fact that a given group does less well on a given exam proves nothing about that exam.
In fact, given that the Grand Valley State University's Human Performance Lab recently studied numerous physical performance parameters between males and females and found that in, “upper body lifting (Men= 1.45 + 0.2, Women= 0.78 + 0.13), men had significantly higher strength to body weight ratios for upper body strength, while there were no differences in lower body strength relative to body weight...This relationship was the same when computed against lean body weight...These results indicate that men have significantly more upper body strength than women, would seem to indicate that 4% may be much “better than expected” given the data on male/female strength differentials.
For the Human Performance Lab Study SEE: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/glassst/hpl.htm
In EVERY locale in this country Fire and Police Departments give standardized written and physical exams to create “eligibles lists,” from which to choose their workers.
Thousands of the tens of thousands of applicants who take those exams, pass those exams, but only the hundreds of candidates at or near the top of those lists, based on those competitive exams have any chance of being hired.
In point of FACT, thousands, probably tens of thousands more men pass those exams and do not make the “eligibles lists” then women, but no one seems to be shedding a tear for them.
No one has yet made an argument that such competitive exams create “an undue barrier against women and some ethnic minorities.”
Disparate impact has been discredited in the courts as a “measurement of discrimination.” The fact that a given group does less well on a given exam proves nothing about that exam.
In fact, given that the Grand Valley State University's Human Performance Lab recently studied numerous physical performance parameters between males and females and found that in, “upper body lifting (Men= 1.45 + 0.2, Women= 0.78 + 0.13), men had significantly higher strength to body weight ratios for upper body strength, while there were no differences in lower body strength relative to body weight...This relationship was the same when computed against lean body weight...These results indicate that men have significantly more upper body strength than women, would seem to indicate that 4% may be much “better than expected” given the data on male/female strength differentials.
For the Human Performance Lab Study SEE: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/glassst/hpl.htm
