The recipient of the Kate Sheppard Memorial Award for 2026 is Leanne Allen for her research that examines women’s underrepresentation in operational firefighting.
Leanne has been a career firefighter with Fire and Emergency New Zealand since 2020. Before that, she worked as a firefighter in British Columbia, Canada, where she grew up. She is a Secwépemc First Nation woman and now a citizen of Aotearoa New Zealand
For years, Leanne has heard the same explanations for the under-representation of women in firefighting: women simply weren't applying, or they weren’t strong enough. Repeated often enough, the narrative began to make it seem as though the problem was women themselves, that somehow women were responsible for their own absence.
So she began to question the assumptions behind those explanations, and what they left out.
Her Master’s thesis at Massey University, The women who never became firefighters: Institutional Responsibility, Physical Employment Standards, and the Geography of Exclusion, challenges the ideas that women ‘simply aren’t applying’ or that they ‘aren’t strong enough’ Leanne’s research examines how recruitment practices, physical employment standards, and institutional assumptions, many shaped by historical ideas about who is physically suited to firefighting, can produce unequal outcomes.
Physical employment standards are a particular focus of the work. Fire services need physical standards because firefighting is genuinely demanding work and safety depends on getting them right. But where a standard has not been adequately validated, or where it has been developed around one kind of body as the default, it can exclude people for reasons that may have little to do with whether they can actually do the job.
Leanne believes her research asks some deeper fundamental questions: do the standards measure what the job actually requires, who was (or was not) involved in the setting of that standard, and are the outcomes of those standards being measured, monitored and reported.
The research also looks beyond fire services to the wider institutions that shape how women's inclusion and exclusion are understood and addressed. This includes universities and the production of knowledge, human rights and employment law, government agencies, and other systems of accountability.
Legislation, legal interpretation, policy and institutional practices can themselves carry assumptions that reproduce exclusion. At the same time, those same institutions can provide important mechanisms for challenging discrimination and creating change. Her research is interested in that tension: how institutions can both reproduce inequality and provide the means to disrupt it.
Leanne’s Indigenous heritage is central to how she approaches this work. It shapes how she understands relationships between people, institutions and systems of power, and her responsibilities as a researcher. Her research is grounded in Indigenous principles of relational accountability, alongside a strong commitment to social justice. Leanne believes research should contribute to a better understanding of how inequality is produced and, wherever possible, help identify ways that it can be eliminated.
The Kate Sheppard Memorial Award will support Leanne in completing her research and sharing its findings with the people and institutions positioned to act on them.
For Leanne, the research is ultimately about questioning the traditional narratives that decide who gets to belong, whose bodies and experiences are treated as the norm, whose knowledge and presence is valued, and what needs to change so women do not have to overcome unnecessary structural barriers simply to participate and succeed.