NFPA Journal - Spring 2023 - 41

coat to make sure I don't literally catch when I'm
bending down. " Landing at the proper size means
juggling a number of other variables, including
chest size and sleeve length, and the results are
rarely satisfactory. " They're not tailored to female
bodies at all, " she said.
When interviewed during the FPRF study, manufacturers
listed several reasons why getting female-specific
patterns right has been difficult, including economic
and production challenges. Despite recent gains,
women still make up a small fraction of the overall
market for firefighting PPE, and some manufacturers
say that creating new lines for women could double
production time and labor and decrease efficiency,
especially since curved seams, which are present in
women's patterns, are more complicated to produce.
" There are definitely barriers to designing and making
these products...and then making it something that
these people can turn around and afford, " one manufacturer
told researchers. " That's already a challenge
in the market, let alone with the segment of female
customers that is much smaller. "
Others pointed out possible issues with NFPA
standards, which they say limit innovation and
the types of garments they are allowed to make,
especially regarding wildland clothing. Critics
point to NFPA 1977, Standard on Protective Clothing
and Equipment for Wildland Fire Fighting
and Urban Interface Fire Fighting, which governs
sizing requirements for wildland gear and includes
a sizing chart with specific lengths and circumference
measurements for a variety of garments for
sizes ranging from XS to XL-and it's that specificity
that can result in problems, they say.
" The restrictive sizing charts in the standard are
the biggest hinderance for us, " says Koreana Hallam,
a cofounder of Green Buffalow, a company that has
been designing and manufacturing female-specific
wildland firefighting clothing since 2020. " I think
currently they really limit innovation and creativity,
because there are multiple measurement points
that start at a certain number and you can't go any
smaller. The problem is, if you start with a measurement
point that is too big for one part of the
garment, it affects all the others and everything else
will look and fit a little funny. "
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to achieving better fitting
female gear, however, is something that seems, from
the outside at least, to be maddeningly obvious and
simple to fix. Despite decades of progress for women
in the fire service, there's still currently no substantive
data sets detailing the body shapes, sizes, and dimensions
of female firefighters. This fact alone makes it
difficult to properly design and pattern female turnout
and wildland gear, even if the will and money are there
to do so, researchers said. " Even those manufacturers
who have wanted to make better gear specifically tailored
for the female form have historically struggled to
do so because they just didn't have the anthropometric
data-it didn't exist, " McQuerry said.
This lack of data makes manufacturers hesitant
to invest time and resources into developing female
patterns, which could be based on faulty assumptions.
" Years ago, we did look at going to a female pattern
and what we found is [that] we couldn't, " one
manufacturer told the researchers. " There wasn't
enough data out there to give us good insight as to
what that pattern should be, because if you look at
the general population of females-is that really a
representation of the female firefighter community? "
THE PATH FORWARD
From the outset, Kwon and McQuerry knew that
they wanted their research project to go beyond
simply outlining the problem-they wanted it to be
part of fixing it.
All of their interviews indicated that manufacturers
lacked anthropometric data for female
firefighters, and so, despite a global pandemic significantly
slowing things down, they went out and
gathered the data themselves, using a mobile body
scan tool that works on a typical smart phone.
" It was really important for us to have something
that was convenient because we needed to collect
as many measurements from as many participants
SURVEY SAYS
" One of the big problems I have is
that the sleeves are about six inches
too long, so I have to hike them up to
get my gloves on-it really limits my
mobility of arm movement. "
-FEMALE FIREFIGHTER
as possible, all while working remotely from two
separate locations, " Kwon said.
They settled on a mobile technology called
MeThreeSixty, which let them use their phones to
scan nearly 200 structural and wildland female
firefighters from different angles. Their measurements-including
waist, hip, stomach, thigh, calf,
total body surface area, and other variables-were
uploaded to a cloud database for analysis. The
women firefighters who volunteered to be measured
hailed from across the country; a large portion of
the scanning was done at an annual Women in Fire
conference, but much of it was also completed at
local departments, including in Orange County,
where Avery enthusiastically recruited women in
the department to participate.
" I spoke to local fire chiefs and to the women to
make sure they understood what we were trying to
do and how important it was for them to participate, "
Avery said. " Because without this data, we
really can't move forward to make sure that this
important change occurs. "
What resulted from those efforts is " to our knowledge,
the largest and most comprehensive database
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