‘Man Enough to Care’: The Growing Trend of Men in Nursing

When you hear the word “nurse,” what are the first three words that come to mind? There is no doubt that “caring” is one of them. Maybe “compassion,” “trusted,” or “hardworking.” But what about the nurse’s gender? It’s OK if you thought “female,” because you wouldn’t be alone.

Longstanding societal stereotypes have made it such that we associate women with the nursing profession. I myself fell prey to this stereotype early on in life. When I graduated from college, I was working at a hospital in New York City where I worked closely with both doctors and nurses, and even though my gut was telling me that nursing could be the right profession for me, every nurse I worked with was female. So instead of applying to nursing school, I decided to take post-baccalaureate premedical courses and went the physician route.

It wasn’t until I turned 28 in 2010 that I decided nursing was in fact the right profession for me. It was the obvious choice because I knew I had the attributes that make a great nurse. Knowing that I could make a real difference, I disregarded the fact that only 9% of nurses were male at the time, and I pursued an accelerated second […]

2025-01-28T09:56:44-05:00January 28th, 2025|Men in nursing, Nursing|1 Comment
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To Recruit More Men, Rebrand Nursing as ‘Masculine’? Or Just Stop Oversimplifying the Profession

As a registered nurse for more than 40 years—with experience in pediatrics, public health, and philanthropy—I read a recent article by NPR’s Shankar Vedantam (“Why More Men Don’t Get Into The Field Of Nursing”) with interest. Vedantam essentially argued that more men don’t enter nursing because it’s seen as a “feminine” profession and proposed that we start emphasizing the more “masculine” attributes of the profession.

From youthful contrarianism to a deeper vision of the profession.

When I became a nurse in 1975, my choice was shaped first by my youthful desire to be contrarian: to bend gender norms by being a man in a “woman’s” profession.

When I began practicing nursing, however, I grew in my understanding that a commitment to nursing, particularly in my specialty field of public health, provided me with the means to act every day in concrete ways to further healing and build community. And so I applaud calls like Vedantam’s drawing attention to the need for more men in nursing. The need for diversity (of all kinds) in nursing was highlighted in the 2010 Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report.

The deep-rooted public view of nursing as ‘women’s work.’

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2018-11-14T10:57:09-05:00November 14th, 2018|men in nursing, Nursing|6 Comments
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Reluctant Heroes: When Men in Nursing Cry

Reluctant Hero / graphite, charcoal, and pastel on paper / by Julianna Paradisi 2017

I first learned the effect a man’s tears have on my emotions from the parents of my young patients when I was a pediatric intensive care nurse.

I am not unaffected by the tears of a woman, but in the PICU the tears of the mothers differed in nature from the tears of the fathers.

A mother with a hospitalized child will cry, and when overwhelmed, she will break down. But in the PICU, more often than not, she took a tissue from the box I handed her, wiped her eyes, breathed deeply, and then put on a brave face to protect her child from knowing her fear and concern over his welfare.

When the father cried, it was an admission of helplessness. His problem-solving toolbox was empty. The tears represented feelings of personal failure, powerlessness to protect his child and family from disease or trauma. His criteria for being a father, or a man, was eroded.

These displays of total soul-brokenness undid me every time. […]

2017-01-18T10:32:08-05:00January 17th, 2017|career, men in nursing, Nursing|6 Comments
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AJN’s Top 15 Most Viewed Articles in 2013

by rosmary/via Flickr by rosmary/via Flickr

We thought readers might be interested in seeing which articles and topics got the most page views in 2013. Many of these articles are open access, including a number of CE articles as well as the articles from our Evidence-Based Practice: Step by Step series. Some articles require an AJN subscription or individual article purchase. Several of the articles in this list were from recent years other than 2013; a couple were much older, but are evidently still relevant, since not every idea in nursing is ephemeral or subject to improvement by the next generation.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

1. “Asking the Clinical Question: A Key Step in Evidence-Based Practice” – (March, 2010) – part of AJN‘s EBP series

2. “Improving Communication Among Nurses, Patients, and Physicians” – (November, 2009)

3. “The Seven Steps of Evidence-Based Practice” – (January, 2010) – part of our EBP series

4. “Nurses and the Affordable Care Act” – (September, 2010)

5. “From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice” – (December, 1984; not HTML version; readers must click through to PDF version)

6. “COPD Exacerbations” – (CE article; February, 2013)

7. “Therapeutic Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest” – (CE; July, 2012)

8.

2016-11-21T13:05:35-05:00January 24th, 2014|Nursing|0 Comments
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Why Aren’t There More Men in Nursing?

Male nurse action figure/ gcfairch, flickr Male nurse action figure/ gcfairch, flickr

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

Men have served in nursing roles since at least the third century, when a special order of men was said to have existed to care for plague victims in Alexandria. And various religious orders seem to have had groups of men devoted to nursing tasks during the Middle Ages.

More recently, a number of men served as nurses or in nursing roles during the U.S. Civil War—Walt Whitman, who extensively visited wounded soldiers during the Civil War, has sometimes been described as one, though he mostly focused on tasks like writing letters for illiterate soldiers, bringing them special foods and necessary items, and providing companionship. (See our article on Whitman from our 100th anniversary issue of October, 2000.)

There were schools of nursing for men since the early 1900s. Last year, we published “My Grandfather’s Unpublished Manuscript” (August, 2012), a wonderful story of how the author (a nurse) found an article describing her grandfather’s experiences during his education and nursing career, which began with graduation from nursing school in 1929.

There were several early articles about male nurses in AJN—the oldest one I found was from March, 1924: “A School of Nursing for Men,” by Kenneth T. Crummer, described the school of nursing for men at the Pennsylvania Hospital and its founding 10 years earlier, in 1914. The final sentence reads, “Who knows […]

2016-11-21T13:08:36-05:00January 8th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|22 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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