Hard time for men taking on nursing

Men in nursing have a hard time in the workplace, doctoral research shows.

While women have made significant advances challenging stereotypes in male-dominated roles, the same cannot be said for men in the nursing profession, according to Thomas Harding's PhD thesis.

Dr Harding, who is Unitec's nursing degree programme leader, interviewed 18 men in nursing and analysed more than 600 written works for his study.

"Think of a nurse and you invariably think of a woman to the point that men in the profession are so unusual they are identified as 'male nurses'," he said.

The gender bias was not a trivial matter.

"There are some very real barriers because of the preconceptions. Some people refuse to be cared for by men or are reluctant to have their children treated by one, and men in nursing constantly have to justify and defend their career choice to others - they are constructed as not just inferior nurses, but inferior men."

Dr Harding entered nursing in 1982, influenced by friends in the profession, and attracted by the lifestyle, nature and financial security of the job. But many men are still locked out of the caring professions.

"I think it's actually getting worse with the suspicion that is directed now towards men, for example, in early childhood education. And that has a real spin-off for men in nursing as well, because of the fact we're so intimately connected with our patients.

"I think the frustration for me as a man who is a nurse is the fact that your motivation is questioned all the time."

Primary schools in the 1960s often had large numbers of male teachers.

"That was thought of as quite normal. And men would be able to pick children up and dust them off if they'd fallen over and were crying, and take care of them, but now a man would be really afraid to do that."

Ongoing nursing shortages and the fact that men are socialised not to see nursing as a career have implications for the entire sector, he says.

"We need more men who are able to demonstrate that it's okay to be caregivers. And that there is nothing unmanly about it."

Men also understand male problems better, too.