This study har aimed to examine why there are still so few women working full time as firefighters in the Swedish municipal firefighting services, even though there has been a political goal for about twenty years to increase gender equality in firefighting. The study uses a structured focused comparison of two groups of municipal firefighting organizations to compare them against each other in order to understand why they differentiate, and identify factors that has made some organizations more successful than others. The study uses Lundquist’s (1987) simplified actor model’s three factors, understand-can-will, to explain the failed implementation. The study concludes that the simplified actor model can be used to explain differences in implementation and to identify factors that have led to successful implementation, and that the most important one seems to be the understanding of the problem. However, they seem to enable each other in a way that makes it impossible to say that they could create successful implementation if one was lost.