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A Survival Guide for Male Nurses. Really.

 |  By Alexandra Wilson Pecci  
   July 09, 2013

Male nurses face all kinds of prejudices when they enter the workforce. Those preconceived notions and misjudgments are not only harmful to them, but to the nursing profession as a whole.

"There's a real interesting thing about men in nursing," Connie Curran, EdD, RN, FAAN, told me a few weeks ago. "They go to the top."

Research seems to back up her assertion. Data released earlier this year shows that even though men represent less than 10% of the nurse workforce in the United States, they are paid more than their female counterparts.

Full-time female nurses earned 91 cents for every one dollar earned by their full-time male colleagues. For both full-time and part-time nurses, the survey found that men earned an average of $60,700 per year and women earned $51,100.

That's why I was skeptical about the need for the new book Man Up! A Practical Guide for Men in Nursing. A part of me felt a savage sense of satisfaction that nursing is the one, last bastion of female domination. So what if there aren't as many men as women in nursing? So what if men feel like they're outnumbered and less influential at work? Welcome to how many women feel all the time.

But I had a change of heart when I actually started reading the book. Male nurses face all kinds of prejudices, ranging from the idea that they're inherently not as caring as women, to the notion that nursing is a "womanly" discipline, the book says.

For example, the book's lead author, Christopher Lance Coleman, PhD, MS, MPH, FAAN, wrote about how disappointed his father was in his choice to become a nurse.

"My family perceived nursing as a woman's profession," he wrote. "My parents worried that a man choosing nursing would face obstacles such as stigma, limited opportunities, and low pay… the word 'bedpan' kept creeping into conversations."

Just think about what that implies: That changing bedpans—i.e., real, hands-on, down-and-dirty caregiving—is a woman's domain. Such prejudices and stereotypes are not only potentially harmful to male nurses, but to female nurses and to the nursing profession. The belief that men are too masculine for nursing implies that nursing itself is weak.

The book also made me more aware of the gendered language that so often accompanies nursing. Coleman writes that in textbooks, classrooms, and conferences "she" is always the pronoun of choice when describing nurses.

I'm guilty of this, too, something that a reader of this column recently pointed out to me in an email. She wrote to complain about the headline and gendered language in the article, "When Mean Girls Wear Scrubs."

"A full 20% of my nursing staff is male," wrote Lynne Beattie, RN, MSN, Interim Manager Telemetry at Seton Medical Center in Daly City, California. "As sensitive as I was to being left out of the usual "he" and "him" communication in the late 70's, I'm equally sensitive today to articles [and] discussions that imply all nurses are female."

"A full 20% of my nursing staff is male," wrote Lynne Beattie, RN, MSN, Interim Manager Telemetry at Seton Medical Center in Daly City, California. "As sensitive as I was to being left out of the usual "he" and "him" communication in the late 70's, I'm equally sensitive today to articles [and] discussions that imply all nurses are female."

Her email also stuck a fork in the savage satisfaction I once felt about women dominating nursing. When someone knows what oppression feels like, they should do all they can fight it elsewhere.

The IOM's report on the future of nursing calls for more diversity in the nursing profession, including more gender diversity. For men who are in the nursing profession or want to pursue it, Man Up! seems to provide a good primer for navigating the field.

The book covers nearly every aspect of work along the entire nursing continuum, from the decision to become a nurse, to "breaking" the news to families, to moving through school, to finding a mentor, to becoming a nurse leader or entering academia. 

And it provided this little nugget, which really struck a chord with me: "Research shows that men enter nursing for the same reason as women: They hold personal values (like caring for others) that are consistent with the holistic approach in nursing. Men who are nurses and seek leadership roles must be aware and sensitive to the fact that inequities on social and professional levels still exist for both male and female nurses."

No one wins when one group of otherwise equal workers is perceived and treated differently than another.

Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.

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