The Group Portrait: Fighting Fires and Men

The FDNY's first woman commissioner puts its gender gap in relief.

- Nia Prater

NEW YORKERS HAVE long grown accustomed to seeing female cops and subway conductors, but it's not often that they come across a woman at the wheel of a careering firetruck. Eight women graduated from "the Rock"-the FDNY training academy-in August, bringing the number of female firefighters in the force to 141, the highest in its 157-year history, out of a total of around 11,000, a glaring gender gap for a department that has been eligible to admit women since the 1970s.