By Lizzie Johnson
San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco has 230 parks, playgrounds and open spaces that cover 3,400 acres spread across the city. To keep those areas safe, the park department employs 53 rangers -- in essence, its own police force.
And while those rangers, who give out information, protect the parks from vandals and enforce safety, are the public face of the city’s parks, there’s one thing they aren’t: female. San Francisco’s park ranger force has fewer female members than many other major American cities.
And while the city’s police and fire departments have increased or held steady the number of women in their ranks, female rangers have dropped from 18 percent of the force in 1997 to 11 percent today. In comparison, the number of female firefighters jumped from 8.9 to 16 percent over the past two decades, and female police officers stayed at 15 percent, higher than the national average of 12 percent.
“You know, I wasn’t aware of that,” said Recreation and Park Commission President Mark Buell. “My general attitude, being surrounded by strong women in my life and considering myself a feminist, is that it ought to be our goal to correct that. If there isn’t parity, there ought to be, and we should strive for that.”
The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department’s force looks like this: 53 full-time park rangers made up of 47 men and six women. Zero women in upper management. Three of the women are dispatchers, and two of them are patrol rangers are on disability leave. The only woman on active patrol duty is a trainee on new-hire probation.
Tonya Lett of Vallejo, 57, is that ranger. She began classes in December and will remain on probation through June. Lett studied criminal justice and spent 20 years working as a high school security guard in Richmond. She said she hasn’t minded being the only woman on the patrol force.
“They cover me, and vice versa,” Lett said. “I get along great with the men on the force. I handle my own, and they respect me. I’m just one of the guys.”
So why is Lett one of so few women?
“That’s just all who applied,” said San Francisco Ranger Chief Mike Celeste. “Those are the applications we got. With civil service, we are required to go through a list. We are mandated by that list who and how we bring people on board.”
Rec and Park spokeswoman Connie Chan said the department is bound by the job qualifications set by the city’s human resources department and that there is little it can do outside of recruiting to increase the number of women on the force. Jobs are posted by the city, and applications flow directly into the human resources department, not the park department. Applicants are sorted based on criteria decided by the city.
“Typically what we do is a job analysis,” said Susan Gard, chief of policy for the San Francisco Human Resources Department. “We analyze what the nuts and bolts are of what that person does every day. That’s how we establish the minimum qualifications.”
The most recent round of applications, for a training class of 13 rangers that began in December, brought in 198 people -- 171 men and 27 women. Only two of those women passed the written exam, Chan said -- 31 men passed.
“Those are some shocking numbers,” said Supervisor Katy Tang, who has advocated for women’s issues on the board. “It’s the first that I’ve been aware of the issue specifically regarding park patrol officers.”
On a recent afternoon, ranger Elmer Jimenez drove a white, four-door pickup around the fringes of Golden Gate Park, then parked to do a foot patrol near Alvord Lake at the park’s eastern boundary. He pointed a pair of tourists from the Midwest to the nearest restroom and ordered people in a small homeless camp to throw away their trash.
“Our job isn’t to go after you,” he said. “It’s to work with you to make things better. I have family living in San Francisco. My motivation is to make a difference in the park system and the people who use it, like my family.”
If Jimenez worked somewhere else, he would have more female colleagues -- other major cities have more equitable gender distributions.
- New York City has 246 park patrol officers, of whom 84 -- 34 percent -- are women. There are 31 women in upper management.
- San Jose has 30 full-time park rangers, of whom 12 are women and 18 are men, making the force 40 percent female. A woman holds the single upper management position.
- In Philadelphia, there are 18 full-time rangers. One-third of them are women, and another two women hold supervisorial roles.
- Phoenix’s force employs 47 park rangers and is 17 percent female, with eight women and 39 men. One woman holds a supervisor’s job.
San Francisco park officials say they cannot legally set a gender preference. But the city’s minimum qualifications could inherently disqualify women from the career.
One year of work experience in police, military or park ranger field work is required, plus a state powers-of-arrest certificate or completion of a POST academy, which is peace officer basic training, and a driver’s license. Higher education is not required.
Traditionally, women are minorities in those prior work categories. According to Pentagon figures, only 14.6 percent of the U.S. military is female, and a 2016 Department of Justice report found that 15 percent of sworn police officers in San Francisco are women.
Other cities have different criteria. San Jose requires applicants to have at least two years or 60 semester units of college with an emphasis in natural or environmental science, park management or park operations. The arrest certificate is not required, and basic law enforcement training comes after hiring.
In Los Angeles, applicants must have a four-year degree with a major in park administration, recreation, botany, zoology, biology, fire science, criminal justice or related fields. Full-time experience as a park ranger, firefighter, paramedic or other peace officer may be substituted for education.
Having more women on the force is important for diversity, said Pam Helmke, San Jose’s senior park ranger and a director of the Park Rangers Association of California. If a force doesn’t have women, there won’t be a pipeline for other women to follow, she said.
“When I do recruiting and hiring, I look at the big picture long term,” she said. “I like to see diversity in our ranger ranks because when we go out recruiting, we can’t recruit from the population if people don’t see themselves in the workforce.”
So how how can San Francisco go about attracting more female applicants?
“There’s no quick fix,” said April Lidinsky, director of the women’s and gender studies program at Indiana University South Bend. “If organizations are looking at persistent inequalities, they have to think about more ways to address that than just throwing their hands up and saying, ‘We don’t understand why we only get male applicants.’”
Ranger Chief Celeste said San Francisco tries to address that now.
“It’s just us getting out there and promoting,” he said. “That’s the biggest thing we can do. And our HR Department does do that. I believe they go to colleges and job fairs and do everything they can to get diversity and women in the force.”
Gard said Rec and Park reached out to 30 public agencies and educational institutions for their most recent hiring class, including the Women’s Career Opportunity Fair in San Francisco in 2015.
“We try to reach out to women who aren’t traditionally in these fields,” she said.
Another source may lie in education.
West Valley College in Saratoga is the only community college park management program in the state, and one of only a smattering across the country. School officials say about half the students in the program are female.
The school works with many Bay Area parks programs -- including the East Bay Regional Park District, San Mateo County parks, the National Park Service, and San Jose parks -- to funnel women into the career field. But it hasn’t worked with San Francisco’s park department.
“There are certain agencies that have clung to that male environment, but there are so few of them,” said Chris Cruz, department chair of the park management program. “It’s not the issue it used to be. San Francisco is surprising to me because it’s not consistent with what other agencies are doing.
“I have female rangers that have graduated from our program that have worked all over the Bay Area,” he said. “Nothing is perfect in any agency, but I do see a lot more variety nowadays. San Francisco -- why they haven’t done that, I don’t know.”
He said the civil service criteria mandated by the city is a limiting factor that would bar many of his female students from getting a job in San Francisco.
“Some agencies will set the minimum requirements up in a more general format to cast a wider net and get more candidates,” Cruz said. “Some agencies will narrow down the focus to a specific type of person. I see that happen on occasion. It could prevent anybody, not just women, from applying.”
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