Call any physician or surgeon a ‘male doctor’ and check out their usually confused, sometimes insulted expression. Their head might tilt a bit, and they might smirk, assuming it’s some sort of joke or prank. So then why is it that the term ‘male nurse’, a profession so similar to that of other healthcare-related fields, has become nearly unanimously used where other gendered adjectives haven’t?

One might blame this on a historically female-focused nursing career, especially in relation to Florence Nightingale, whose nursing schools revolutionized healthcare. Nightingale saw the squalid conditions of hospitals during the Crimean war and changed sanitation and health guidelines to prevent unnecessary death and disease. Her schools after the war, while embodying the future of health, were female-only, with Nightingale saying that “women had a natural capacity for caring” while men, supposedly, did not. So, is it this opposition to men in nursing that shaped the field today?

Not quite. While Nightingale’s nursing schools didn’t allow men entry, this was for practical reasons. Women finally had a place where they could hold a job and feel useful, feel creative and employ their passion: nursing. Nightingale knew men could still be nurses – and indeed they had been, for thousands of years before the Crimean war. Her nursing schools, however, were targeted toward women simply because at the time, women were oppressed from the general workforce in every other field.

Then, if Nightingale wasn’t the issue, what was? Why are only 12 percent of all nurses male, and what’s the issue with the term ‘male nurse’? Well, the problem might just come from the nurses themselves – and their attitudes toward nursing.

Taking a look at surveys of current nurses, one thing stands out. Gender roles have been historically common throughout all professions, but especially stand out in historically female fields like nursing. And this is evident today in both men and women in nursing. For example, men in the nursing field have often felt like higher-ups think that men do not have the compassion or sympathy to be nurses and treat them as such. Additionally, they often might emasculate men who choose this career, showing the prevalence of gender roles in the field. While this is bad on its own, it often leads to male nursing students internalizing gendered tasks in nursing, creating worse nurses who are not secure in their masculinity. Often, men in nursing feel that tasks like washing the perianal area and bathing a newborn are tasks ‘best left to a woman’. This is due to teachers and nurse mentors pushing these ideas onto male nurses from a very early point in their careers.

Additionally, the language and connections that nursing mentors/teachers use during nursing school can often affect both male and female viewpoints of nursing. For example, male nurses often highlight the management, leadership, and technical aspects of their careers while female nurses highlight compassion and positive self-image. This further shows the internalization of these ideas and the results it might have on future nurses’ careers.

Regardless of such experiences, we need men in nursing. It’s been shown that patients often like seeing male nurses at their bedside, especially boys. It can be inspirational and provide a sense of relativity for them.  Often, male nurses can bring a unique perspective to situations where others cannot. Alienating male nurses does nothing to help the situation, because they are vital to a functioning team of hospital staff. Creating a comfortable role for all nurses, including men, is the first step in eliminating the ‘male nurse’ stigma altogether.

And that’s where the name comes in. ‘Male nurse.’ All that phrase does is isolate and detract from the role of a nurse. It suggests, in some implicit way, that a man who is a nurse needs to be distinguished from the supposed ‘standard’ of nurses. It creates an environment wherein job prejudice can live and doesn’t work in anyone’s favor. Getting rid of the ‘male nurse’ signifies a step in the right direction, a new trend where any man – who is, of course a nurse – can just be a nurse.

-Aadhav Saravanan

Quotes from male nurses:

It happened that I was the only male nurse in the team during the clinical placement and I felt a little left out because the clinical mentor did not take me seriously. She always addressed us as “you girls”. I had a similar experience at one lecture.

 I was bothered by the fact that I was often the target of ridicule because ‘I have chosen a female profession’. 

Some content is traditionally more related to the female than the male perspective, but I feel they are trying to change this.

I think this is also embedded in the language. We constantly see during the lectures in PowerPoint presentations the name “nurse” referring only to female students and almost never is the male form of the word used.