My firefighter quota story has attracted a lot of attention and prompted all manner of interesting correspondence. I thought I would send an update – showing you some of the comments plus intriguing news about ongoing battles on the gender quotas front.
Bending the gender in jazz awards
First a wonderful story about a fracas currently taking place over the National Jazz Awards. This major award in 2021 focused on jazz pianists and the ten finalists have recently been announced. Look at their pictures above. Horrors, they are all men!
All hell has broken loose at this politically incorrect outcome, particularly since, due to COVID, the competition was judged through blind online auditions. All ten best candidates just happened to be men. Naturally, the very active women in today’s jazz world immediately started complaining, saying it needed to be made “fairer” by removing the blind audition and including a gender quota. Isn’t that pathetic? But, oh, so typical.
Science caves to gender warriors
Scientific American has just published an intriguing story about the most prestigious award given by the world’s largest earth and space science society, the American Geophysical Union. The AGU’s fellows award recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to their fields through scientific innovation, breakthroughs and discoveries.
The list of the top five candidates, all nominated by peers after a rigorous process, came in – and they were all men. So, the committee charged with making the final decision about the fellowship wimped out. The fellowship was not awarded.
Gender battles in the police force.
Plenty of policemen have been in touch with me, talking about the impact of gender quotas on the police service. Here are comments from some of them:
“At the police academy back in 1978 all recruits had to pass an aerobic course in a limited time in order to graduate. We all had to train early in the morning for months to get through, unless you were one of the 50% female recruits who weren't required to complete the same standard. Later, after graduating, I was badly beaten by a huge drunk driver I was trying to arrest; the policewoman who was my partner had locked herself in the police van.”
Another one who has been in the force for 12 years talked about declining physical standards:
“We used to have large fences in the obstacle course but a lot of the girls trying to join did not have the upper body strength to get over the fence, so they just removed the fence from the course. Hmm, I’m pretty sure they will have to jump fences in real life and the bad guys run just as fast if it’s a female officer chasing them.”
He also mentioned other ways the training has changed:
“The actors who play the role of bad guys at the academy used to call us horrible names and really go to town on us during scenarios because that's what happens in real life. But a few of the girls complained about being called "a cunt" or being told that they were going to be raped. So, the actors are not allowed to say things like that anymore. Well. I’m sorry but on the road, you’re going to have the worst things said to you and you need to get over it! It’s your job to take it and remain professional.”
Various people alerted me to the interesting fact that six months ago Queensland’s corruption watchdog, the Crime and Corruption Commission found thousands of men had been discriminated against as a result of the Queensland police department’s 50 per cent gender target. Different standards were found to apply to male and female applicants with men forced to reach “artificially high” cut-off scores and female applicants approved despite failing physical and cognitive tests. At one point they had 163 female applicants and needed to hire 160 of them. So they offered them jobs before they were even tested because they had to take them regardless of their results.
Funnily enough, the gender quota was introduced under a male police commissioner Ian Steward, but scrapped by a female one – Katarina Carroll, when she was appointed in 2019. Here’s an amusing take on all this from Spectator Australia, giving the criminals’ reaction to the shelving of the gender quotas.
Thoughts from the trenches
Finally, random thoughts/comments from a variety of people, including many dealing with these gender issues in their workplaces - mostly gathered from my YouTube channel where I posted the firefighter video:
“A couple of decades ago I was a controller in the Rural Fire Service. It was notable that two occasions I had to call ambulance to female firefighters who had either collapsed or were close to collapse. In a crew returning from a hazard reduction a lightly built young woman of about 18-22 was very faint, lost muscle tone, went deathly pale. The whole crew and truck were out of the game while the group captain responded to the ambulance. Very embarrassing for her but potentially dangerous on the fire ground with half a dozen strong fit young men withdrawn.”
“Early this year, near our local shopping centre carpark, my husband noticed two female ambulance officers obviously struggling to lift patient up into their ambulance. They were grateful when he went across the road and helped them lift the stretcher (with a strapped on fairly solid male) up and over the deep gutter and up into the ambulance. He said the two youngish women were of rather slight builds and quite obviously just did not have the combined physical strength to get the stretchered patient up into their vehicle.”
“I've been a firefighter for 23 years. In reality, half the guys on my department have a hard enough time doing the job when it comes to a serious working fire. And as you get older it gets harder to perform. In my younger years it was exciting fighting fires but the past couple I have been on were taxing on my stamina. You have to have a maniacal attitude and be in shape to be able to get the job done when the sh*t hits the fan. This ain’t no reality show or TV series.”
“Women will be killed by this change in rules, or members of the public. Will there end up being civil suits against the government for allowing people that aren’t competent to do the job? I am a woman & have worked in the fishing, plumbing, and manual labour industries and I know I am unable to do physical tasks that men can do. Does that mean because I am a woman all of us should be put at risk by attempting a task that I cannot safely do? That is a blatant OHS issue that as an employer I could be prosecuted for, but the government is allowed to breach it because it’s woke.”
“It's also about camaraderie. The other firefighters want to make sure they can trust the capabilities of the other members of their team. They're trusting those people with their lives.”
“About time! I've noticed a huge gender gap in the statistics between men and women killed on the job. More women in dangerous jobs should close that gap significantly.”
“The women won’t be in dangerous jobs- they will be in admin, communications, etc, because they will be too much of a liability to their colleagues and themselves to be actually on the front line. They will, however, get paid the same, if not more.”
That’s it, folks. I hope you enjoyed reading this lively correspondence, often from people who told me they wouldn’t dare talk publicly about these taboo topics. But nothing will change until we all have the courage to start to challenge this madness.
If you did not know these stories are real, you would think they were some kind of parody.