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There are a lot of posts on here about how evil women in the nursing field are as a whole and how they are all gossipy and overly emotional, and how difficult it is to work in their environment.
I find this incredibly ironic. Almost every field and every profession is male dominated. We have not reached a status of gender equality. (Of the Fortune 500 companies, only 1.7 percent of corporate officers are women.) You just walked into one of the VERY few professions that has an overwhelming majority of females. Yes, the culture is going to be different. Some women deal with problems and confrontation in a different manner than males traditionally do. However, that does not mean men in the nursing field are beyond adaptation. Do you not think that women have a similarly difficult time in other industries adapting to bias and more traditionally masculine methods of handling situations?
I don’t have a problem with men in nursing. Don’t let people bring you down. Do what you love to do. If that’s nursing, then go for it.
That said, I will second someone above who stated they felt uncomfortable with males in the OB-GYN/midwife/etc. field. It has nothing to do with my faith in their ability; I just personally don’t feel comfortable with it. I suspect many men would feel equally uncomfortable receiving a prostate exam or a scrotum cough thing from a young female nurse. This might explain the discrepancy of male nurses in that field. It may just be patient preference to some extent.
Laura, RN, on 3 male nurse myths
