The San Diego City Council on Tuesday approved a $275,000 settlement for a former firefighter recruit whose lawsuit claimed gender discrimination, retaliation and a hostile work environment.
Nicole Pappas, 32, said she was wrongfully terminated in 2016 after speaking up about lewd comments and penis drawings in the Fire Academy locker room.
Pappas said members of her 2015 recruiting class criticized her weight, commented on her butt and forced her to look at penis drawings by taping them on the wall, emailing them and posting them on social media.
After she described such things during an independent investigation by the city’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Pappas said, the city added a discriminatory requirement that she could not fulfill. She sued in 2017.
Before agreeing to settle the case earlier this winter, attorneys for the city said in court documents that the requirement — running three miles in 24 minutes — was not discriminatory, and Pappas’ failure to fulfill it was the only reason for her dismissal.
According to the lawsuit, Pappas’ first few weeks in the four-month fire academy were going well. Pappas actually completed a 3-mile run in under 24 minutes in her first month.
Pappas’s lawsuit mostly focused on behavior in the academy class, which had 33 men and three women. She said men made inappropriate comments and posted penis pictures, and some male recruits allegedly pushed and shoved her.
Pappas said Fire Department supervisors saw the harassment and did nothing to stop it. She contended an instructor said to a male recruit, in reference to Pappas, “you’re going to let a girl answer the question and get it right before you?”
She also contends the city discriminated against her by forcing male and female recruits to share the same locker room.
Then Pappas broke her leg and couldn’t return to complete her academy work until fall 2016. In the interim, she testified during an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission probe about the harassment she experienced.
Her lawsuit claims the Fire Department retaliated by making the 3-mile timed run a new requirement for entering the academy. When she couldn’t repeat her previous running success, she was then fired.
The city has since eliminated the timed run as a requirement to either enter the academy or become a firefighter, the lawsuit says.
Pappas was working as an emergency medical technician in San Diego for a private company when she filed suit. In it she contended she would have made significantly more money as a city firefighter.
The city council, which first approved settling with Pappas on Jan. 8 in a session closed to the public, was required to approve it again in open session on Tuesday.
San Diego’s first female firefighters were the result of the federal government stepping in to stop alleged discrimination and demanding the Fire Department begin hiring women in the mid-1970s.
The Fire Department two years ago celebrated the 40-year anniversary of hiring its first female firefighter in 1977. Today about 50 of the department’s roughly 850 firefighters are women.
At nearly 9 percent female, Pappas’s academy class was almost twice as gender-diverse as the department overall, which is about 5 percent female. That’s higher than the national average of about 4 percent, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
In recent years, the city has hosted outreach events to encourage teenage girls to consider careers as firefighters or lifeguards.
Pappas was represented by local attorney Michael Conger, who has a long history of representing city workers with grievances and who helped uncover problems with the city’s pension system.
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