By Kathleen Shannon - Producer, Contact - News
Big Sky Connection - It’s challenging for women to break into the wildland firefighting industry, which is largely male, and the U.S. needs more firefighters. Fourteen training bootcamps for women–which have been popular in recent years–were canceled with the Trump administration’s DEI cuts. Comments by Riva Duncan, vice president, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
Click on the image above for the audio. Common barriers to hiring and retaining federal wildland firefighters include low pay, mental health challenges and limited workforce diversity, according to a 2022 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. (BLM Oregon and Washington/Wikimedia Commons)
Kathleen Shannon
March 26, 2025 - Wildland firefighting is a tough job and the industry has long struggled with worker retention. Training boot camps have helped bring new firefighters, especially women, into the fold in recent years, but federal cuts could threaten progress.
About 84% of federal wildland firefighters are men, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Boot camps targeting women have been popular. Montana saw its first just last year.
Riva Duncan, vice president of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, worked in fire for more than three decades and said the boot camps offered a "safe environment" to raise concerns.
"Beyond the actual required training, just having discussions about, 'Well, how do you address hygiene? What do I do if I feel like I'm being treated unfairly?' And those kinds of questions that don't get covered in a classroom setting," Duncan explained.
Since the boot camps are designed to increase workforce diversity, future programs have been cut under the Trump administration's DEI rollbacks. Following the firing and then rehiring of 6,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees since February, including some with firefighting duties, the Interior Department announced permanent pay raises for wildland firefighters in the new federal appropriations budget.
The U.S. Forest Service has seen a 45% attrition rate of wildland firefights over the last three years. Duncan argued the DEI cuts will not help.
"We need people who want to do this work. We need the kind of people that value working on the public lands and serving the American taxpayers," Duncan emphasized. "This has detrimental effects to the overall recruitment and retention strategy to try and get firefighters into these jobs."
Fourteen different scheduled women's boot camps have been canceled. According to the USDA, about 65,000 wildfires burned nearly 9 million acres across the U.S. in 2024.
| Best Practices |
