Government should encourage more Men to be Nurses
In these times of gender equality, you might think that a
profession as high profile as nursing would have a fairly balanced number of
men and women. Especially when you consider that male nurses are marginally
better paid and proportionally more likely to be in senior posts than their
female colleagues. But despite this, the number of men entering the profession
has hardly grown in recent years.
According to the most recent NMC figures, only one in ten
nurses on the register last year were male, a figure that has remained static
for the past four years. Although there has been a rise in men entering the
profession in the last few decades, it has been a small, slow one.
While perceptions are beginning to change, some nurses
believe that the profession is still seen as a feminine one. Ian Hulatt, an RCN
policy adviser and mental health nurse, says: ‘I think public perception is
still that it is a female occupation, which sometimes makes it hard for blokes
to say: “I’m going into nursing.” In some ways I think the public is still
unsure what it wants from nurses – half still think of a nurse as the subject
of an erotic fantasy and the other half want to see someone with a stethoscope
around their neck.’
Furthermore, there are significant differences between how
certain practice areas within the nursing profession are viewed and this is
reflected by big differences in the proportion of men working in different
sectors. According to
workforce figures from the NHS Information Centre, mental health – which has
long been regarded as an ‘acceptable’ job for men – is more than a third male.
Other areas that attract a lot of men include intensive care, theatre and
A&E, which are seen as more ‘macho’ than other areas of the profession.
‘I did
the typical male nurse thing and initially gravitated towards critical care and
surgery. It was just seen as much more acceptable,’ says Steve Robertson, a
post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire, who
worked as a general nurse before moving into health visiting and then education.
‘When I’m in the pub and tell people I’m a nurse, they are sceptical but when I
tell them I work in intensive care, they think of me slightly differently.’
However,
in areas such as health visiting or midwifery, where men make up 1.5% and 0.8%
of the respective workforces, men’s career choices may still be questioned –
not just by members of the public but also by some members of the profession.
Mr
Robertson explains: ‘There does sometimes seem to be an undercurrent among
female colleagues as to what is and isn’t appropriate. I suspect most of my
health-visiting colleagues were unsure about whether blokes ought to be doing
the job. It never came out overtly but covertly I think it was there.’
Even
those men going into a supposedly ‘more masculine’ area of the profession admit
that their career choice has sometimes raised eyebrows and this can be a
barrier that prevents men from entering the profession.
Brian
Owens, who is a staff nurse in a day surgery unit at Royal Wolverhampton
Hospitals NHS Trust, left a career in the male-dominated world of banking to
train as a nurse. He says: "People
did express some doubts, despite my going into the slightly more manly area of
surgery. Nursing is still seen, to some degree, as the Florence Nightingale
profession and it is still very female-dominated".
He
believes this springs partly from the public’s lack of knowledge about what
nurses actually do, which could deter younger men who have little experience of
being in hospital.
‘The
public perception is that a nurse is a runaround and that all you do is wash
people. Of course, that is part of the job, but it’s not the only part. Nurses
have a good deal of respect and responsibility. Unless they’ve been into
hospital and been cared for by a nurse, I don’t think people realise how we
actually spend our day.’
Another
barrier that may deter some men from entering the profession is the issue of
pay. While obviously both men and women face the same low-level starting
salary, for men it may be more of a disincentive because, on average, they earn
more than women.
Figures
from the Office of National Statistics reveal that in April 2007 the median
earnings of full-time male employees in the UK was £498 per week compared with
£394 for women. The average full-time nurse salary was £436 a week.
Dave
Munday, Unite/CPHVA professional officer and a health visitor, says: ‘I think
it’s the case that women who go into nursing see themselves earning a better
wage than they can in other jobs but men going into nursing would see it as a
lower wage. I think pay probably is still an issue to some degree.’
However,
male nurses do in fact earn slightly more than their female colleagues and that
gap has widened in the last four years, figures from Income Data Services
reveal. Men are also more likely to take on senior positions and are
disproportionately represented at higher levels. For example, despite making up
a tenth of the workforce, 17% of nurse consultants and 18% of nurse managers
are male.
However,
being male is not always an advantage in a profession and, like any minority
group, there are times when they face discrimination. Mr Hulatt, who trained in
the 1970s, says: ‘My generation of male nurses were exposed to blatant
discrimination. For example, you weren’t allowed to do the maternity or
health-visiting placements and if you pressed for
it,
there would have been a question over your motive. Today there’s less overt
discrimination. There’s equity of opportunity to do midwifery, for example, but
there’s
still a
covert cultural message that puts a question mark over why males may want to do
those things.’
But do
we really need more men in nursing? Mr Robertson says not. ‘From the research I
don’t think it’s too much of an issue,’ he adds.
Mr
Hulatt disagrees. ‘I think it seems appropriate to me that services should
reflect the community they serve. We feel that about ethnicity – that we should
be able to walk into a hospital and see a reflection of the community’s ethnic
mix. Why shouldn’t that apply to gender?’
