Male Nurses: Breaking Down Prevailing Gender Norms. On a crisp, September night in an ER room, the warm and caring affection of the male nurse made all the difference in the world to a 15 year old boy.
At 15 years old, gender imbalances in the workplace were far from my mind. At the time, I didn’t give it a second thought, or find it unusual, that the nurse was a man. What was important was that he provided the care, comfort and reassurance I needed during a traumatic event.
How often do we see men in the role of caregivers, especially in the nursing field. Not very often, right?
In this particular profession, females overwhelmingly outnumber males. Men make up fewer than 10% of the nursing workforce according to a 2011 U.S Census Bureau study. On the rare occasion that I’ve made a trip to the hospital, or to see a doctor, I can only recall one experience with a male nurse.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I was involved in a biking accident that landed me a trip to the ER. The neighbor kid and I were double riding a bike down a small, steep gravel road that led to both of our houses. Probably not the smartest thing to do, especially without helmets.
As we sped down the hill for the third or fourth time, we hit a large rock that was embedded in the road as we attempted to make the sharp 90-degree corner at the bottom. We lost control and ended up crashing the bike into a skid, just narrowly missing a patch of blackberry bushes, stinging nettles, and fence posts off to the side.
The neighbor boy faired pretty well. He ended up with a couple of scrapes and bruises. I, on the other hand, was not so lucky. At first, I appeared to only have suffered a badly scrapped knee and arm. However, upon closer inspection in the bathroom mirror, I noticed a large chunk of flesh missing from my left arm near the elbow. This explained why there was so much blood drizzling down my arm and onto the white porcelain sink and white tiled floors. This was an injury I couldn’t just slap a bandage on. I clearly needed stitches.
My dad and I quickly dashed out of the house to the nearest hospital some 20 miles away. We forgot to leave a note for my mom, who would later come home from work to find a trail of blood throughout the house and lead her to a pile of dirty and bloody clothes. My poor mother! Eventually, my dad called her from the hospital.
Several hours after arriving to the emergency room, I finally got to see a doctor.
The doctor ended up being ill-tempered. His bedside manners were terrible he told me to “suck it up” as he scrapped the dirt and rocks out of the wound before sewing it back up.
At one point during the ordeal, I began to really freak out. A marble-sized rock had lodged itself inside my arm. As the doctor worked to get it out, I could hear and feel the rock scrape against the bone. It was a painful process to say the least. Where was a shot of morphine when I needed one?
The pain relief finally came, but not in a shot of morphine. The relief came from a soothing hand on my shoulder, the nurse. The male nurse. In stark contrast to that of the doctor’s, the nurse’s personality was friendly. He had a genuine, caring disposition about him. He placed his hand on my uninjured arm gently squeezing it in reassurance as I cried out profanities in pain. He talked softly in my ear saying that “everything was going to be okay. It will all be over soon.”
After the doctor stitched up my arm with some 40+ stitches, he left the nurse to finish taking care of my injured knee which luckily, only needed a good cleaning and a bandage.
I think one of the main reasons this incident stands out so much more clearly, compared to other trips to a hospital, is because the nurse was male. Up until that point, I don’t recall having experienced the more gentle, caring side of another man before. Most of the men I had encountered in life up to that point embodied the stereotypical “masculine traits” of dominance, strength, and aggression. This male nurse stuck out in a profession dominated by women and showed me another side to masculinity: masculinity espoused in compassion and nurturing. He was one of my first encounters to this more enlightened masculinity which I wouldn’t recognize, or learn about until, many years later.
In 1970, only 3% of the nursing population were men. Over the decades, the gap has been slowly closing, albeit at a snails pace. In some places however, it seems to have closed quite a bit. My sister, who is respiratory therapist at a hospital in Mason City, Iowa says the ratio of male to female nurses is about equal.
In our hyper-masculine society, males are often thought of as unqualified to be nurses. This may be due to the caring side of nursing where a nurse espouses the traits of nurturer and gentleness, which are often seen as feminine, and unmanly.
My male nurse, and many others like him, are breaking down these prevailing gender norms and show that a man can be just as qualified and fit to preform the duties of a nurse.
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