Rantz: Seattle Battalion Chief wrong to claim sexism keeps her silenced

Seattle Fire Battalion Chief Tamalyn Nigretto claims she’s the victim of sexism at the hands of the Seattle Fire Department. I think she may be the victim of her own ego and personality shortcomings.

In an interview with the Seattle Times, Nigretto says she’s purposefully being left out of media interviews and events. According to the Times,
letting the public know that Nigretto was in charge of the Ride the Ducks crash, which made international news, would have been “a great platform for the department to celebrate the accomplishments of women and to recruit women and minorities,” she said.

“Instead, they’ve gone out of their way not to contact me or give me an opportunity to speak,” she told the Times. “I would have loved to have met the governor and to be part of mentoring women and girls who might see me and think, ‘Whoa! I could do that.’?”

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She claims that despite being the incident commander at the recent Greenwood explosion, she was not offered up for media interviews; instead, a male lieutenant was. She also was not invited to meet Gov. Jay Inslee, who personally met with the fire crew that took on the explosion.

The fire department has their reasons: the male lieutenant was already scheduled to do an interview prior to the explosion and they stuck with him, and the Inslee event was impromptu (no individual was invited).

“None of this was intended, and I feel bad Chief Nigretto feels that way,” said fire chief Harold Scoggins. “Chief Nigretto did a great job (at Greenwood). Everyone did a great job, but I didn’t reach out to anyone individually.”

Nevertheless, she still feels like a victim. In fact, her wife even wrote a letter to Scoggins, Inslee, and Mayor Ed Murray complaining that the department won’t “recognize and appreciate Chief Nigretto’s extraordinary accomplishments in successfully managing Seattle’s most devastating and catastrophic incidents.”

There is no evidence she’s the victim of sexism, though when discussing institutionalized sexism, it’s certainly not an easy thing to prove. What we do know is she’s been passed over for a promotion to deputy chief last year. Why? She claims to the Times that Scoggins told her she “has an edge to her, a sharpness. ‘I need you to dull that,'” she said he told her.

Scoggins has admitted he told her that she had “hardness to her.”

Well, that may be a reason she’s not asked to comment to the media. Intentionally cutting her off from media or not, it seems in the department’s best interest to keep an edgy and sharp public figure from speaking on behalf of the fire department after traffic events.

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And while Nigretto’s goal of inspiring women to join the fire department is admirable, her job is not to inspire future battalion chiefs. More troublesome is that her language and complaints (and her wife’s complaints) scream that she’s more interested in her personal brand than doing what’s best for the job. And if she’s acting selfishly rather than selflessly &#8212 when she’s not being included in some media event unintentionally &#8212 of course she’ll think she’s a victim of sexism.

We now scream sexism as a tool to create some kind of change; sexism doesn’t actually need to happen for you to use this tool. To believe that the city is actively trying hide its gender diversity in a department that lacks it seems rather untenable.

Scoggins is black, Murray is gay, and the Seattle Police Department chief is female. The city rightfully celebrates this diversity even while, at times, tokenizing them (which is extremely problematic). This is a city that actively pushes ideological agendas instead of common-sense policy if they think it’ll help check off more boxes to prove to the world how progressive they are. Why wouldn’t that be the case with Nigretto? Perhaps it really is her personality, not her gender.