DiversityNursing Blog

That’s right—there are men in nursing, too! It’s time to rid ourselves of outdated stereotypes. We don’t live in a society where boys only like blue and girls only like pink. Where boys can only play with legos and girls can only play with dolls. There’s too much variety in this world to limit ourselves to what we think is expected of us. There are women in engineering and mathematics, and there are men in nursing and healthcare.

Population Growing for Men in Nursing

Nursing is a fantastic career. In fact, the number of men in nursing is growing, with the percentage of male nurses increasing almost every year. In addition, there are more men in nursing schools, making up 13% of nursing school students. Find out more facts about male nurses by reading the men in nursing infographic below.

Source: www.collegeamerica.edu

Written by Sarah Okeson

Joe Long first thought of becoming a nurse when his wife was hospitalized for a week during her pregnancy with their second child. He now works at Mercy Hospital Springfield, taking care of patients in the intensive care unit.

“Nursing is manly,” Long said. “It’s not just for women.”

About 6.6 percent of nurses nationwide are male, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. In Springfield, about 7.3 percent of nurses at CoxHealth are male. At Mercy, about 11.4 percent of the nurses are male.

The American Assembly of Men in Nursing was formed in 1971 in Michigan to provide support for male nurses. An Ozarks chapter is being started. There are also chapters in St. Louis and Kansas City. The organization also is open to women.

“It’s a very female-oriented world and we’re OK with that, but men still need to socialize,” said Paul Pope, the chapter president and a nursing instructor at Southwest Baptist University.

The executive director of nursing at Mercy Hospital Springfield is a male nurse, Kurtis Abbey.

Nurses like him have faced some of the obstacles that women entering predominantly male fields have faced. There have been lawsuits and complaints about isolation.

Rick Leroux, a nursing instructor at Southwest Baptist, got into nursing with the encouragement of his aunt. He learned how to make chitchat with children and to be absolutely honest about whether a medical procedure would hurt.

He treasures moments such as an encounter with the adult daughter of a man he had cared for who had a heart attack. She hugged Leroux and thanked him.

“Those are the moments we live for,” Leroux said.

Female employees at Mercy said they appreciate male nurses when it comes to lifting patients. They also value other qualities such as help in dealing with sometimes-disruptive families.

“We have a lot of difficult patients,” said Becky Pierce, who has worked at Mercy for about 40 years. “For each difficult patient, you have family members who sometimes need the physical presence of a man.”

Dr. Tobey Cronnell said male nurses tend to be more supportive of female doctors.

“I particularly enjoy working with male nurses as a female physician,” Cronnell said.

Long recently tended to John Goar, 73, who was admitted to Mercy Hospital Springfield after having trouble breathing.

Long gave him insulin and some other medication and then told Goar that his relatives were on their way to visit.

“He’s as good as a woman,” Goar said.

Long left Goar’s room. He was about halfway through his 12-hour shift. He doesn’t miss his previous career as a loan officer for a mortgage company.

“It’s the first time I have a job where I actually look forward to going to work,” he said.

Source: News-Leader.com

BY ARI BLOOMEKATZ

He was riding in his aunt's sedan, a kid in elementary school, watching senior citizens walk in and out of the Lynwood retirement home where his mother worked. Then she emerged in scrubs.

That's it.

David Fuentes holds on tightly to that simple memory: his mother at work. It's easier than recalling many other parts of his childhood — "a blur," as he calls it.

Like the time when he was little and his father, drunk, socked his mother. She remembers the blood gushing from her face and her child standing in the bathroom saying, "Mom, Mom."

Or the times when he was older and his mother had fallen into addiction. He would stay awake fearful of what might come when she went out looking for a fix.

Or the times he took care of his siblings when no one else would.

"Just like the basic things. That's all I really remember," Fuentes says, "kind of helping to make sure they got fed, and just keeping them company, making sure they were OK."

His face tightens slightly with some questions about the past. But he knows he doesn't need to remember everything.

He has his one simple memory. His mother, a nurse.

She always dreamed of becoming a registered nurse, but life got in the way.

"There's a huge family dynamic," says Fuentes, 26. "I wanted to fulfill for my mom what she envisioned for herself, but could never do."

This summer, he graduated from nursing school at UCLA and landed a job in the intensive-care unit at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica.

Beyond being a trailblazer in his family, Fuentes is among a group of men redefining the nursing industry. Although the profession is still dominated by women, the number of men is on the rise.

David Fuentes attends the morning huddle before the shift change in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica on April 11.

The percentage of male registered nurses more than tripled from 2.7% in 1970 to 9.6% in 2011, and the proportion of licensed male practical and vocational nurses increased from 3.9% to 8.1% over the same period, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Researchers cite various reasons for the shift, including diminished legal barriers, increasing demand for nurses as the U.S. population ages, and middle-class pay.

But for Fuentes, a main motivation is the solace he finds in being a caretaker.

"Everything is left behind," he says. "That's why I love it so much."

"It's like therapy ... kind of our way of dealing with our issues."

The sturdy curve of his biceps, the gauge in his left ear, the lip ring and tongue ring might seem intimidating if it weren't for the delicate way Fuentes presses on the legs of a 99-year-old patient to check her blood flow, or how he cups his hands and drums on her back to help her breathe more easily.

It is 45 minutes into his first shift as a registered nurse, and Fuentes and another RN are caring for the elderly woman, who had been in septic shock.

She is blind and mostly unresponsive, but Fuentes asks politely, his voice soft but direct: "I'm going to take your temperature ... OK?"

Another nurse says the woman's family stayed for 15 minutes earlier in the day. But Fuentes will be there the whole night standing guard — giving her medicine and monitoring her pain and breathing on his 12-hour overnight shift.

His black curly hair is pulled back into a ponytail and he's wearing navy blue scrubs, the color of the uniform defining his new rank.

"This is the first day of the rest of my life," Fuentes said before his shift started.

Fuentes thinks it's only natural that some patients feel more comfortable with nurses of the same gender, but mostly, he says, it doesn't come up.

David Fuentes examines Russell Sherman, 87, a patient being treated for a pulmonary embolism. Sherman says he remembers when all nurses were women in white uniforms.

A couple of months earlier, during his training, he was checking the oxygen flow into patient Russell Sherman's nostrils when the 87-year-old looked him over admiringly and said he remembered when the only nurses at hospitals were women in white.

"They were always girls," Sherman said. "It doesn't faze me at all. I think it's a good thing for men to be able to do a job without shame."

One of Fuentes' heroes is UCLA School of Nursing Dean Courtney Lyder, the nation's first male minority dean of such an institution.

Lyder, 47, said his own dean at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Luther Christman, was the first male dean of a school of nursing in the country. Tall and muscular, he "debunked a lot of preconceived myths about nursing."

Decades later, Lyder said, stereotypes about men in nursing are fading and the experience he had in nursing school — one of five men in a class of 200 — is becoming more uncommon. Although he says "we still have a long way to go" as an industry, 11% of students at UCLA's nursing school during the 2012 - 13 academic year were men.

"Men are seeing that this is a viable option that pays well, you have a good lifestyle, you give back to society," Lyder said, adding that nursing groups such as the American Assembly for Men in Nursing have also surged on college campuses.

"Nursing doesn't have a gender. Society and media have portrayed nursing as feminine," Lyder said. "It's not."

But there are nuances, some more subtle than others.

Huddled around sack lunches at a table outside the hospital, a group of undergraduate students — about eight women and one man squeezed in at the far end — took turns saying that they wanted to become nurses because they want more meaningful relationships with patients, not just because it's a good career.

David Fuentes makes the rounds with registered nurses Pamela Helms, center, and Heather Alfano in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica.

But they struggled to respond when the conversation shifted to pay grades, and the fact that even though men are far less represented in the field, census data show that women earn less on average, 91 cents for every $1 earned by a man.

"I think men obviously are more stronger than women, so maybe," one of the female students said, grasping for a reason. "I don't know, I'm trying to justify it."

The group packed up a few minutes later and went back to work.

Fuentes says that he decided to go into nursing in his freshman or sophomore year of high school, but his mother says his instinct for caretaking goes back much further than that.

"Sometimes I feel that maybe he grew up a little bit too fast because he wanted to make things easier for me," said Guadalupe Perez, 44. "Always got the impression that he kind of knew what was going on, like he just understood.... You could see the sadness in his eyes."

She's proud of her son, even when he chose to live with his aunt and only saw her on weekends.

"He has a good heart, he was always there for his little brother," she says. "Maybe it's just something that ... got into him, always being there to help someone."

But Fuentes is already thinking much bigger than his first love and about the role that nurses can play in the national debate over healthcare and the changes to the healthcare system.

Even though his past is painful, he doesn't want to put it behind him. "It's made me who I am," he says.

Late one night before graduation, Fuentes scribbled his thoughts about the nursing industry and then read them aloud as if his fellow graduates were listening.

"I am sure every single one of you in those seats, pre-license and licensure students alike, can attest to the roller-coaster ride that your respective nursing journey has taken you on," he wrote.

"There have been lots of ups and downs, unexpected turns this way, that way, every which way you could and never would have fathomed, but look at us now, we made it!"

Source: LA Times

By Rob Goodier

(Reuters Health) - Fictional male nurses on television are sidelined in supporting roles, portrayed as the butt of jokes and cast as commentary providers or minority representatives, all of which makes it harder in reality to recruit men to nursing and retain them, according to a new study.

"People don't make decisions about which profession to choose just based on television, but students have told us that popular TV shows can help them choose a career, or that TV perpetuates negative stereotypes about nursing that they then have to address in practice," said Dr. Roslyn Weaver, an adjunct fellow at the University of Western Sydney School of Nursing and Midwifery, who led the research.

"So when men in nursing are almost invisible in popular culture or are stereotyped as incompetent or somehow ‘unmasculine', then men who choose to enter nursing can find it difficult to combat this," Weaver told Reuters Health by email. "Perhaps reflecting this, there are often higher attrition rates for male students than female students in nursing."

In the United States men account for roughly 9 percent of nurses, according to the census bureau. And that figure is similar in the United Kingdom and Australia.

Past research has documented "stereotypical images around nursing, such as the battle-axe, naughty nurse and handmaiden," Weaver and her colleagues write in the Journal of Advanced Nursing.

With a growing number of men entering the profession, the authors point out, it's just as important to examine how male nurses are portrayed in popular culture.

For their study, the researchers viewed one season of each of five American medical television dramas, including Grey's Anatomy, Hawthorne, Mercy, Nurse Jackie and Private Practice. They evaluated aspects of the episodes such as dialogue, costumes, casting, cinematography and editing to compile a perspective on the ways that male nurses are characterized.

To their credit, the shows tended to expose and reject stereotypes. But, in a contradictory
trend, they also reinforced the clichés by characterizing male nurses as men who are not traditionally masculine, the researchers found.

Common stereotypes that the shows reinforced include the nurse who is mistaken for a doctor and the gay or emasculated male nurse. Male nurses and midwives in the shows tend to suffer condescension from their colleagues and patients and are the object of comedy.

The male nurse characters also tend to hit multiple diversity targets in casting. The researchers coined the term "minority loading" to denote characters who represent more than one minority group, such as Angel Garcia on Mercy, a gay Hispanic male nurse, and Mo-Mo on Nurse Jackie, a gay Muslim male nurse.

The results were "pretty consistent" with a prior study of male nurses in film that Dr. David Stanley, an associate professor of nursing at the University of Western Australia, published in 2012.

By Christina Orlovsky

Ask a young girl what she wants to be when she grows up, and top answers are often a teacher or a nurse, which are professions that have been associated with women throughout history. Ask a young boy the same question and neither answer is likely to be given.

Ask Christopher Lance Coleman, PhD, MS, MPH, FAAN, and he’ll tell you that inequity has to change.

Coleman, an associate professor of nursing and multicultural diversity at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia and the author of Man Up! A Practical Guide for Men in Nursing, is a strong advocate for recruiting males into the nursing workforce and empowering them to pursue leadership roles. His new book serves as a roadmap for men seeking to break into the predominantly female nursing profession.

“I believe men need a guide, a blueprint to use to navigate through the complexity of specialty choice and a culture where, frankly, a gender disparity still exists,” Coleman explains. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime for men not only to change the face of nursing in the 21st century, but also to reshape the public image that nursing is a women’s profession.”

In fact, while the most recent numbers show that men are still a clear minority in the nursing field, an uptick is occurring. According to a 2012 U.S. Census Bureau study, “Men in Nursing Occupations,” which presents data from the 2011 American Community Survey, the percentage of male nurses has more than tripled since 1970, from 2.7 percent to 9.6 percent. Of the 3.5 million employed nurses in 2011, 3.2 million were female and 330,000 were male. It’s a change, but, if you ask Coleman, it’s not enough.

“The startling thing is how underrepresented men still are in areas of leadership,” he says. “While the numbers of RNs has increased, when you look at the profession as a whole--heads of nursing, academia--we are still so far underrepresented. This is significant for males going through school looking for role models and seeing predominantly female leaders. I want men to know this is a viable profession and there are tremendous opportunities out there.”

Coleman believes the greatest opportunities for change are in younger men, who even at the high school level should do their research and start the conversation with their parents about the opportunities that exist for them in nursing. Ethnic minority groups, he adds, are particularly critical.

“Many ethnic minority groups, even today in 2013, still think of nursing as only a woman’s profession,” he says. “That racial disparity needs to be taken away.”

Coleman hopes that his book also opens up a dialogue among current male registered nurses. Empowering male RNs to continue to climb the ladder to leadership roles where they can influence change and serve as a new face of the nursing profession, he says, can encourage them to become the mentors male RNs need to help them succeed.

Another conversation that needs to occur in order to influence a culture shift is one between female nurses who may stereotype their male counterparts as only necessary for heavy lifting or things they “can’t” do.

“That’s a stereotype that hurts women and hurts the profession,” Coleman explains. “We don’t want nursing to be seen as a profession of the weak, we want it to be seen as a profession of the strong, because nurses are strong. We all need to do a better job of marketing ourselves--stop stereotyping and typecasting males and do more education in the hospital setting about gender diversity.”

Many men, after all, possess all the qualities required to be good nurses.

“Passion; someone with a tremendous amount of integrity; leadership skills; with a natural curiosity about the world; someone who is unafraid to take on issues that perhaps have challenged them in the past; someone who could treat someone at the end of the day how they want to be treated; and someone who cares to change the world we live in--those characteristics are essential and they transcend gender,” Coleman concludes. “Those are things I’d like to see in anyone who is interested in entering our noble profession.” 

© 2013. AMN Healthcare, Inc. All Rights Reserved.