When Bronnie Mackintosh started a camp to encourage young women into emergency services, the name "Girls on Fire" was an homage to Alicia Keys's feminist anthem.
The Victorian School of Forestry in Creswick hosted the state's first edition of camp over the weekend, with 10 girls from around the region attending.
"We've been using the fire and emergency services, skills and operations as a platform to teach these young women to have the confidence to step forward in any emergencies," Ms Mackintosh said.
Ms Mackintosh, a station officer with Fire and Rescue NSW, launched Girls on Fire off the back of a Churchill Fellowship research project exploring the lack of diversity in the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS).
The program is aimed at chipping away at social and cultural barriers that discourage young women from joining volunteer services.
Thirty camps have been held since its launch.
The latest annual report for Victoria's Country Fire Authority (CFA) revealed only 11,885 of its 51,720 volunteers were female — just 23 per cent.
"Socially conditioned stereotypes about what a firefighter looks like and does — that's probably one of the biggest social barriers," Ms Mackintosh said.
She said encouraging more women to volunteer was imperative for the success of services like the CFA and RFS.
"Operational sustainability is an important outcome of this, because volunteerism is declining everywhere," Ms Mackintosh said.
She said it was also important that women felt comfortable to be themselves once they became a volunteer.
"I know myself personally, as a junior firefighter, it was so important to me to fit into my male-dominated crew, and the culture that went with that, that I did sometimes compromise my authentic self, in order to be accepted," she said.
Family business
Girls on Fire participant Claire Schultz, 15, is following in the footsteps of firefighting family members, including her brother, father and grandfather.
Her father Anthony Schultz is the captain of the Willow Grove CFA brigade in West Gippsland and works as a private firefighter at a power station in the Latrobe Valley.
"He came up to me the other week and he showed [the camp] to me and said, 'Hey, you want to do this?'," Ms Schultz said.
"I said, 'Sure!' because I want to do a firefighting course."
The pair drove three hours to get to the camp on the other side of Melbourne.
"It helped me wrap my head around it more and understand what I've been learning in theory for junior fire brigade," Claire said.
"[It] has kind of cemented in my brain that yes, this is enjoyable, this is what I want to do."
While Claire said she had never felt explicitly discriminated against, there were still improvements needed to make the service more welcoming to women.
"It's very obvious that it's very male-dominated and there aren't very many facilities [for women]," she said.
"For example, the change rooms, there's just one big area."
But despite the challenges, Claire still wants to be part of the service that has been such a big part of her family's life.
"When I was a little kid, the Black Saturday things happened [and] my dad went and fought in those ... he was gone for long periods and I know it affects him a lot," she said.
A spokesperson for the Country Fire Authority said the organisation was building its capability and awareness around inclusivity in the workplace.
"The aim is to be recognised as an organisation that actively promotes, supports, and enables diversity, inclusion and fairness and is representative of the broader community in which we work," they said.
