Fresh on the heels of a judgment against sex discrimination in hiring in the Chicago Fire Department, the City is now facing a new lawsuit charging that the discrimination is still ongoing. Just last month, the federal court of appeals in Chicago ruled that the City had discriminated against women for more than a decade, using a faulty physical “performance” test to hire paramedics for the Fire Department. The test did not measure job qualifications and favored men over women, according to the court of appeals. On Friday, twelve more paramedics sued the City in federal court, asserting that the hiring discrimination is ongoing. According to the lawsuit, after finally letting go of the discriminatory hiring test, the City created new tests to disqualify capable women in the Fire Academy. The suit charges that “unequal treatment and hostility to the presence of women in the uniformed ranks of the [Chicago Fire Department] are standard practice … and they are too pervasive to be unintended.” The suit is brought by a dozen women who applied for jobs as paramedics and passed the City’s “Paramedic Physical Abilities Test,” the “PPAT,” before entering training at the Fire Academy. Despite their demonstrated physical capabilities, once in the Academy, the women were required to take two new tests–which the lawsuit alleges do not measure a person’s capability as a paramedic job and are, instead, “the CFD’s own DIY inventions.”

According to the lawsuit, one timed test requires candidates to go up six flights of stairs with a 250-pound dummy, among other maneuvers—a test that the lawsuit asserts even Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago said is “not realistic.” The other test requires candidates to step up and down an 18-inch box to the beat of a metronome, holding 25 pound weights in each hand, for at least two minutes, without losing the beat. Jennifer Livingston, one of the women who filed the lawsuit, said, “I have been working as a paramedic for 17 years and have carried very heavy patients up and down stairs, lifted patients onto stretchers, and helped pull patients who have fallen down in their bathrooms out of tight spaces. No partner of mine has ever questioned my physical capabilities.” Livingston added, “One thing I have not done on the job, ever, is step up and down an 18-inch box, keeping beat. That’s not what paramedics do.” The lawsuit filed on Friday by Chicago attorneys Marni Willenson and Joshua Karsh alleges that the City dumped its discriminatory pre-hire test for paramedics in 2014, while fighting the earlier lawsuit. When the City started using the new PPAT, more women were hired. Then, instead of welcoming women into the Chicago Fire Academy, the City instituted the new tests, which tend to weigh heavily against women candidates and don’t measure whether they can do the job. The new lawsuit asks the court to eliminate barriers to the full and equal eligibility and participation of women as Chicago Fire Department paramedics. The suit asks for the elimination of physical tests which have no job-related justification.