Like many college students, Clair Martin decided to switch majors. But when he announced his plans, he found himself in the dean’s office.
“The dean said that if I went ahead with my decision, I would have trouble taking care of myself and I would definitely have a hard time supporting a family,” Martin recalls.
“Nursing, I was told, wasn’t a practical option for a man.”
Today, Martin is dean of nursing at the University of Colorado in Denver.
Though the words men and nursing still sound incongruous to many ears, recent trends suggest that the situation is starting to change.
In 1991, 10 percent of an estimated 190,000 nursing students were men, nearly double the percentage a decade earlier, though no one expects the field to reach a balance between the sexes in the foreseeable future.
The nursing shortage, nursing’s relatively high starting wages, and the disappearance of other categories of job openings during the recession appear to have triggered the small explosion in male applicants to nursing schools.
Coincidentally or not, the salaries of nurses have risen with the increase of men joining the profession, which long has fought a perception that nurses should endure a second-class status compared with doctors, who were mostly men.
“Nurses command starting salaries of $40,000 in some cases, and there are few other occupations that offer that sort of entry-level pay,” says Peri Rosenfeld, vice president for research with the National League for Nursing in New York. “It’s a field that is pretty much recession-proof, and it’s one where demand seems certain to grow.”
But how are female nurses greeting the influx of men into a field dominated by women?
“The situation in nursing is a reflection of gender relations within our society as a whole,” says Judith Jezek, associate dean, University of Miami School of Nursing.
“To say that collectively female nurses resent men in nursing is inaccurate, but there are individual nurses who, based on their experiences, have some resentment. It’s not a whole lot different from the situation in medicine,” Jezek says.
“There are male doctors who don’t like it a lot that women are increasingly becoming their colleagues.”
The men are coming from diverse backgrounds, frequently choosing to go into nursing as part of a later-in-life career change. Many worked in occupations that shrank during the economic upheavals of the early ’90s. Others, such as police officers and fire fighters, discovered the field through on-the-job exposure to medics and other emergency caregivers.
“Stereotypically, nurses were perceived as providers of TLC at the bedside and men never found that particularly attractive,” Rosenfeld says. “The image is changing. People are beginning to think of nursing as high-tech, and a lot of men find that appealing.”
Rosenfeld says many male nurses want to work in emergency rooms, settings charged with life-or-death decisions and crammed with advanced medical equipment. In some cases, she says, they want to become nurse practitioners, a speciality that offers independence from hospitals as well as more flexible hours. Each state regulates what a nurse practitioner can do, but most work with outpatients and sometimes can prescribe medicines.
David Powell, an emergency room nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, says things have changed dramatically since he entered the profession in the early 1970s.
“When I started out, there was a stigma that said there was something funny about a man who wanted to be a nurse,” Powell says. “It was seen as a helping and caring profession dominated by females, and a lot of men didn’t see that as something they wanted for their lives.”
But Powell, 43, says the increased demand for nurses and the higher salaries have conferred new status to the field. Powell, who is married with three children, says greater flexibility and improved pay make nursing more appealing to men who provide their family’s principal source of income.
“The financial incentive is a big factor,” Powell says. “I see a lot of younger men choosing nursing now who would have never considered this kind of work 20 years ago.”
Despite the rising number of male nursing students, the field’s gender imbalance probably will remain well into the 21st Century. Men continue to hold less than 5 percent of the jobs in a field that employs 1.7 million, a portion that has remained stable in recent years.
“I don’t see nursing becoming a 50-50 balance of men and women in the near future,” Rosenfeld says.
Martin says he believes more men will choose nursing as its image is transformed.
“Men are slowly learning that nursing is about making a difference in people’s lives,” Martin says. “The idea of the nurse as a handmaiden is dead. The status and rewards of this field will grow to the extent that society sees nursing as a human occupation rather than as women’s work. Eliminating the idea of men’s work and women’s work is what the women’s movement has stood for all along.”
But Luther Christman, chairman of the American Assembly of Men in Nursing, criticized nursing schools.
“Some nursing schools have made an effort to recruit men, but most have met the challenge with benign neglect,” says Christman, the former dean of nursing at Vanderbilt and Rush universities. “The discrimination against men in this field goes way back. Even today, the affirmative action goals that apply to male professions have not been extended to the female professions.”
“Men are never apprised of nursing as a career option by high school counselors because the schools of nursing have never made it clear that they want male nursing students,” Christman says. “I don’t think nursing will ever become truly sexually balanced until affirmative action is enforced in all fields.”
