Just curious (OT)

i was wondering how many female dispatchers work in your COMM center?? We are supposed to have 20 dispatchers, but only have 17 right now, out of that 17, 2 are female... Just being nosey.... brianna

We have 24 females full time, and 2 females in training. We have 3 males full time, and 1 in training. We also have 1 male and female going thru background checks, physicals and all the hoops to get hired. When they get hired, we will still be 2 people shorthanded. Our comm center answers the city switchboard, E911, after hours city utilities, dispatch police, fire, rescue and animal control. Our 3 major radio positions are Police, Info & Fire dept. But also have what we call "other" position that answers animal control during daytime hours, and all other city channels at night time. Usually during business hours we have 5 people on the floor, and we work 10hr shifts, 4 days on, 3 off. Thursday is our training day and special assignment day really, because everyone in the dept is scheduled to work that day. So, it's a bit crowed. Day shift is 0700hrs-1700hrs/ 2nd shift is 1500hrs-0100hrs, and my vampire shift is 2200hrs-0800hrs. It's worked out good for the busy hours. We rotate every month, so we each get every other month weekends off. This month, I'm off Mon, Tues & Wed. Work Thur, Fri, Sat & Sun. I am loving it. So far, no one has really complained about it. Sherri

You must work in a busy center... we have no more then 4 people on shift at one time, ere.. we work a lousy schedule, 6 days on, 2 days off, so our days off are constantly changing, which is kind of nice, but every 6th weekend off stinks. we do 0000-0800, 0800-1600 and 1600-0000 shifts. All positions are set up to do all jobs, fire, police and ems dispatches , in addition to answering non emergenciy calls for all county depts, Detective, Sheriff, Probation, etc..and we monitor hiway, inter-county pd, EMA, Haz Mat etc also.. even building maintenence (we call ourselves the county slaves) Even though we are able to do all jobs from all positions, we have main phone position, main police, a scope/NCIC position and a fire EMS I really like what I do, I just wish the shifts were different, 10 or 12 hours shifts would be awesome!!! I would love 3 or 4 days off every other week.. but we don't have enough people to make it work.. oh well Brianna

Used to be that we only had about 2 male dispatchers but that has changed significantly over the years. We had several more and were almost 50/50 for awhile but it has dropped down again recently. There does seem to be a push to get more men in there though. Right now we have 15 female dispatchers and 6 female calltakers. 2 of those calltakers will become dispatchers as soon as they are through training. There are 5 male dispatchers and 1 male calltaker. All the 6 supervisors are males, though. We are also short-handed but I'm not sure we'll ever see our center up to full staff. In the 14 years I've been here we've been up to full staff for only a few months - and that was around 6-7 years ago. I am actually quite surprised that you have only 2 female dispatchers. It is interesting to me how historically dispatching has been more of a woman's job - likely because if you were in a man in law enforcement years ago you were more likely to be a cop - but now it is changing. It's like air traffic controllers - most of them are men. But the thing is, the top performers where I work are women. I love working with the men, and I find great value in their own styles, but I also am realistic when I realize that they do not multi-task near as much or near as well, and they aren't as thorough. It's not a training thing - they know their jobs quite well. But moreso it's I think a gender style. They take on less and feel no remorse over leaving us with more. The troops generally will voice an opinion where they prefer not being dispatched by the men with exception of one. So it is interesting to me that there has been a push in recent years to hire more men over women. It feels to me like management tends to view men as more capable of the job, which kind of annoys me because if you are going to assign a gender as being more proficient (which I don't think you should), I'd have to vote for us wimmen-folk. Men bring their strengths to the table...short and sweet, cut to the chase, etc. But women tend to be faster and more thorough and can multi-task better. Not that I'm trying to start a ******g match over gender here though. I'd be interested to see your perspective on how the men perform in your center since there is such a huge difference. Dina

We have 14 full time dispatchers. 5 women and 9 men. Female director and female database coordinator and female administrative asst. Both myself and the director were dispatchers for many years. It is actually usually about half and half. This is the first time in many years we have been majority male. Sandy

we are an E-911 ctr and have rougly 16 males, 3 of which are in outter office admin, & 2 are shift supervisors. 28 females, 2 of which are shift supervisors... I honestly don't know how many are in training right now. I think there were 6 in training when I went out on leave Oct 25th, 2005...