April 11, 2011 • 20 mins
When we think of nurses, we think of women. Male nurses are considered anomalies and are often the butt of jokes in pop culture. But why? Tune in as Molly and Cristen take a closer look at medicine and gender.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From House top works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Molly. Who would
(00:21):
you say is the most famous nurse in the school?
I've got you in mind? I would probably say Laurence
Nightingale or Clara Barton. And you know what, those two
nurses seven common that they're both female vaginas. Yeah, they
both they both are women. But one important nurse that
is often left out of popular medical history is a
(00:45):
man named Edward Glavin, who created the Society of Registered
Male Nurses in England in ninety seven because Edward Glavin
recognized that, you know what, even though a lot of
women are nurses, men are nurses too, and we need
our we need a society for ourselves, and they don't
(01:06):
need to be made punchlines and pop culture. If you
saw Meet the Parents, you endured an hour and a
half of male nurse jokes because Ben Stiller's character is
a male nurse and Robert de Niro just cannot let
it go. And so that that's the stereotype is that
there are no male nurses, and if there are, there's
something kind of weird about them. Yeah, like their name
(01:26):
might be gay Lord fokker Um. So that's the question
we wanted to investigate, is why does this stereotype persist,
Why do we think of nurses as women? Why is
nursing considered women's work, and what are the implications of
that and kind of like with the home podcast, we
uncovered some tense relationships between very female dominated industry sector
(01:51):
I nursing and feminism, which we'll get to in a minute.
So there's a lot of a lot of interesting stuff
we found in this guess. So shall we start with
some history? Kristen, Of course I love history now, you know,
when I was researching nursing history, I expected to find
like really old articles about the beginning of time and nursing,
(02:12):
you know, during the Crusades and the like. But you know,
most nursing history articles start with Florence Nightingale mid eighteen hundreds.
So that's that's where the history, I guess, of modern
nursing begins, and it's what really cements this association of
women and nursing. But if we go back in history,
(02:33):
way way back and dime. We have in the fourth
and the fifth centuries with the monastic movement, a lot
of these monks are the earliest nurses. They're the ones
going out and um doing the doing the caretaking. And
we have the founding of things like the Order of St.
John of Jerusalem and the Nights of St. John and Jerusalem,
(02:56):
which led to the St. John Ambulance Association, which all
relates back to these male orders of nursing, uh, caregivers, providers,
nursing writers. So until Old Florence Nangel comes along, it
might have been a monk or someone in a monastic
order providing care. The women who did the nursing were
considered very low status, uh sometimes akin to prostitutes. The
(03:21):
scholars words not mine, uh you know the people who
the women who nurse were just you know, it was
not a good reputation to have, and it was because
at the time, if you needed nursing, hopefully you're wealthy
enough to have your family take care of you. So um.
Old Florence comes along to the Victorian era, the height
of it where women aren't educated because it's considered pretty pointless.
(03:42):
Their brains wouldn't hold any information. Florence happened to have
a father who wanted to educate his daughters even though
he really wanted a son. But um and Florence really
took to education. She she wrote some essay where she
positive that Victorian women went mad because they were so
bored not having occupations. So she was very um, much
(04:03):
atypical of her time. She turned down an engagement from
a guy she seemed to love, but she just felt
that that was going to stand in her way of
being a woman of importance. And very early on she
realized that she liked nursing strangers, even though that was
frowned upon. Yeah, and then we have a war, the
Carimean War with between Britain and Russia, and she noticed
(04:26):
that all these Russian soldiers were getting much better care
than the British soldiers, and Florence Nightingale was outraged for countrymen.
She saw her opportunity. She went over and started organizing
the hospitals where the British soldiers were kept during the war,
and she became when as the Lady with the Lamp
because she would go around with her lamp at night
(04:48):
and check on all the male soldiers as they lay sick,
and she really applied a rigorous set of rules to
the hospitals and to the women who worked there. And
it's like you said, Kristen, this kind of reminds of
the home podcast, where these early home EC pioneers were
very much about applying science to homemaking. And that's how
Florence Nightingale felt. She's like, we're going to bring in
these rules about how hospital will look, who works there,
(05:10):
and so on and so forth. She did feel that
women kind of were intuitively meant for this rule, that
they had these ingrained senses of empathy and caring that
made them good nurses, but they also need to go
through a rigorous training to be the best nurses they
could be. Right, So that was the model, the model
that Florence Nightingale established, That was the model that hospitals
(05:33):
adopted and started to run with. But at the same time,
while she was so emphatic about women's natural abilities to nurse,
it also segregated men from being able to nurse as well.
So we have this shift from you know, the early
fifth sixth centuries and onward up until um, let's see
(05:55):
around I think like the sixteenth and seventeenth century when
nursing really becomes more are of um the women's domain.
With Florence Nightingale, she was really adamant about keeping the
men out of it, and she also establishes nurses homes
and residence to Holl's women um who were nursing students
and nursing. That prevents men from being able to get
(06:16):
the nursing education as well because they don't have a
place to stay. And this will continue on. You know,
it probably still happens a day where a nursing school says,
you know, we don't have male bathrooms because the teachers
are female, the students are female. There's no there's no
way for you to come here, male student. And so
people who adopt the Nightingale model, everyone adopted adopts it
because those British soldiers did so well and got so
(06:37):
much publicity. They set up these schools within the hospitals,
not within a college or university for women to go
and become trained as nurses. They were taught by other nurses,
so it's it's a very um female dominated model from
the top down. And you know, they worked with the
doctors who are male and the patients. You know when
one article kind of posits that it was this very
Victorian family where the doctors were the male leaders. They
(07:00):
were the fathers, and nurses were the mothers who obeyed
what the doctors did, and the patients were the children
under everyone's care. But then the formal segregation of women
and men in nursing happens in Britain with the Nurses
Act of nineteen nineteen that can find men to a
separate register, and so they were set aside. You couldn't
(07:24):
register as a male nurse, and you just you could
not go and say I'm a male nurse. And also
it's around this time that male nurses are relegated to
asylums and mental health wards, whereas women are doing more
of the main healthcare type of work. Right, because men
are super strong, you know, they fall back on another
fall back on another gender stereotype, and you know, somewhat
(07:46):
true about physical strength of men. They were the ones
who could hold down those unruly mentally ill patients. And
so then when you think about someone like Nurse Ratchet
in one Flever the Cuckoo's Nest, she's very manly. You know,
they we can talk, you know, for days about how
nurses are depicted in pop culture, but that particular one
shows that people thought really strong, masculine people needed to
(08:07):
work with the mentally ill, and that further serves to
divide people who are working in hospitals or nursing homes
from people who are working in mental health areas. So
because of that gender segregation, we have people like Edward Glavin,
who I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, who
in nineteen thirty seven starts up the Society of Registered
(08:29):
Male Nurses because he was outraged pretty much the lack
of educational opportunities for men who wanted to pursue nursing.
And also in the US, I thought this was interesting.
It wasn't until nineteen seventy one that men in the
American Men formed a similar association called the American Assembly
(08:49):
for Men in Nursing. But because that stereotype gets set
so quickly after Florence Nightingale takes charge of this nursing profession,
you know, they become they're such minorities, and when when
a male wants to pursue nursing, they quickly get labeled
as an other. There's a huge stereotype that male nurses
are gay um. So you know, pretty much through the
(09:11):
early nine to about nineteen sixty, that's that's the stereotype,
is there's something wrong with the man who wants to
be a nurse. He should probably be a doctor. Right.
And even still, male nurses are excluded from helping out
with obstetrics work, um, childbirth things like that. Like when
you think about the maternity ward and you go see
the room with all little babies in it, and who's
taking care of them? Female nurses? You don't see male
(09:33):
nurses up in there, right. And you know, I was
reading one article where a male nurse was talking about
how he worked in pediatrics and he'd walk in to
take care of the child, and the child say, you're
not a woman. I mean, it's it's ingrained so early
on that your nurse is going to be female. So
now we're up to about nineteen sixts it's a problem.
Men like Edward Glavener try and deal with it. Along
comes Second Way feminism. I feel like this this transition
(09:56):
along comes Second Way Feminism seven and so many of
our podcasts. But it really, you know, it's significant because
here here's a statistic that we found in a study
in the Journal of Advanced Nursing from nineteen fifty eight
to nineteen sixty only one percent of nurses were men,
but in comparison, six and a half percent of physicians
(10:16):
and two percent of dentists were women. So we're starting
to see the shift of women breaking through the more
male dominated um medical fields and two doctors being doctors
and dentists, whereas men are still having so much trouble
breaking into this female industry. Right. And you know what
(10:38):
a lot of people wish would have happened is that
when these feminists came along and started saying, hey, women,
you can be the best you can be. You can
be a doctor, you educated, don't be a nurse, don't
be a sissy nurse, be a doctor, you really put
down the field of nursing because they were like, women
have always been nurses, so there must be something wrong
with it. And I think that has really hurt the feeld.
Like with the Home Back podcast, I think this is
(10:59):
a which faults of stuct my feminism is that they
didn't bring men into nursing and they only urged women
to become doctors, because nursing and being a doctor to
different professions, right, and while I can see that it's
troubling to h here Florence Nightingale say things like, well,
women are meant to be nurses because we're just natural caregivers,
(11:21):
you know, we're just maternal giving people, so we're we're
cut out for this kind of work. I can see
all that's difficult, but you can't have a problem with that,
and just at the same by the same token, disregard
all of the contributions to healthcare and uh medical history
that nurses have provided for us. And what the feminists
do is they kind of see medicine as a hierarchy
(11:43):
with the nurses at the very bottom, which is, you know,
often how they're paid. They receive low salaries in a hospital,
they might be seen on the lowest round despite doing
so much of the work. But the feminists very much
see this hierarchy where it's nursing at the bottom, doctors
at the top. So naturally they want all the women
who are interested in me to become doctors. And it
really hurts the nursing profession because it further sort of
(12:04):
stigmatizes it as something that you know, is something that
you know, the lowest of the low do despite the
fact that it's a very meaningful profession that we need,
you know, our best people in ingriding men, right, And
I mean just thinking about it when you and I
were chatting about this topic earlier, I mean, how how
(12:24):
often do you see a nurse practitioner compared to a doctor?
So much more often? I know my nurse much better
than I know my doctor. And because of this, in
the Nurse Delegates um U in the British Public Service
Union elected to drop the image of Fort Florence Nightingale
as the patron Saint of nurses because they felt that
(12:46):
she represents a quote negative and backward element of nursing.
And it's just interesting to think about this, this tension
within the nursing field, because from the public perspective, we
think of Florence Nightingale is this wonderful figures, the lady
with the lamb. She was one of the most revered
figures in popular women's history, so of course that's great,
(13:08):
but once you get into acual nursing, and one of
the reasons that group sided for dropping Nightingale was that she,
you know, didn't really recognize the value of mental health nursing, which,
as we mentioned, where all the men were stuck. And
you know, she was sort of that pioneer of nursing
comes naturally to women, not men, So you know, maybe
idolizing her leaves the men out of it. But you
know it's interesting, is uh this paper that you talked
(13:31):
about in the Journal of Events Nursing, Kristen talked about how,
you know, wars or times when men can become nurses
just because it's so needed. Um, but the way that
they attract men is so much different than the way
that they try to recruit women. You know, there were
a lot of examples of during the war, they'd have
like these really manly posters like be a man, be
(13:51):
a nurse. Yeah, are you men enough to be a nurse?
Like do you love science, then you will be a
good nurse, whereas women were not recruited with things like
science and going to war. You know, women were told
this is a job that you can do and have
a family because you can move wherever, your husband a job,
you can schedule your work around the time your kids
are in school, whereas men, you know, very quickly to
(14:12):
get men into the field, people were saying, well, you
can be in charge of all the nurses. You can
be a male nurse and be in charge because you've
got the caring skills, but you've also got all those
masculine skills that the female nurses still have, right and
that and that family friendly angle of nurses. That's you know,
that marketing pitch to two women to become nurses is
yet another point of tension between feminism and nursing, because
(14:34):
you know, it's like, well why, you know, well, why
should we why should the women have to be the
ones only looking out for you know, how their profession
fits into their family lifestyle. And this article makes the
point Kristen that you know, because of the reason that
uh nursing with saltswoman is this family friendly position. That
was even more reason that if you had a male nurse,
(14:55):
to put him in charge, because he wouldn't have to
worry about his family, he could be the administrator who
is there forty hours a week, whereas you know, you
can't depend on the female nurse. So even in trying
to get more male nurses involved and putting them in
leadership roles, it kind of just steps over the women
who had already been serving as nurses for all those years.
(15:17):
And even though there are those lingering stereotypes about you know,
the gay lord fokker thing with with male nurses. It's
a good idea for people male or female to pursue
nursing because it is one of the fastest growing industry
sectors in the US the aging baby bimmer population. So
(15:38):
you know, the medical field needs nurses, and nursing is
certainly not a one size fits all kind of profession.
They're not only different um duties and different settings for
nursing obviously, but there are also different educational avenues that
you can get in with from a from licensed practical nursing,
it's more of an on the job training under the
(15:59):
supervisi and of registered nurses and physicians all the way
up to advance practice registered nurse and doctoral degree so
you can get your PhD in nursing. Right, you can
do just a realm of education opportunities, and then you
can have your choice of a wide array of ride
array of places to work from a hospital, UH, a
doctor's office or clinic and nursing home. You can work
(16:19):
in other people's home as a home nurse. I can
work in public health. You can work in an office
taking care of office workers, so it's such this it's
such a broad career. Anyone who's ever been to a
doctor or hospital knows how much work these these nurses do.
But you know, that stigma still remains, not just for
male nurses, but kind of for all nurses. Yeah, just
the idea of them being subordinate to their the doctor's subordinates, right,
(16:43):
And it's just and you know a lot of people
say that that is because that that that stigma persists
because it is quote unquote women's work, that it's something
that all women can do because they can all just
take care of your blah blah, no big deal, And
it's really unfortunate. I wish that uh we can right here,
you and I can give nurses the shout out that
they deserve, though I'm sure they would rather take a
bigger salary or more respect from their coworkers. But nurse
(17:05):
as we silly you. Yeah, maybe you know, instead of
on the on the sitcom that everyone loves to hate Scrubs,
perhaps they could have had Zach Brass character be training
for a nurse instead of a doctor and really gotten
a gender friendly message home to all of the people
out there watching. Just an idea, I mean, if if
only we had sitcom time machines, Molly, the things that
(17:28):
we could do well Christmas. I once learned from a
popular hit song, the future is still on written. So
one of our listeners out there might have the perfect
idea for a new show that will highlight the plight
of male and female ourselves. I'd watch it. I await,
I await your contributions listener. And you know, Chris and
(17:48):
I did want to read one email that touched on
something you brought up. This is an email from Meg
and she writes about something we often do on the
podcast where when we talk about a health issue, we
often end with, you know, talk to your doctor, make
a doctor's appointment. You know, we say that a lot
because we're not medical experts. She writes, I realized that
(18:09):
I haven't visited with an empty at my doctor's office
in the last ten years. I have changed practices, visited
different clients in different states, and the pattern is still
the same. I always see a nurse practitioner or an
advanced practice r in um. I wait the time when
I will hear you say, make an appointment with your
nurse practitioner. So we should start doing that on our
health podcast more inclusive see see a Medical Professional. Thank
(18:32):
you Meg. Maybe two days of the Day, beginning of
the future that is yet unwritten. Well, I've got a podcast.
Oh not a podcast, I've got an email here on
our episode on whether it costs more to be a woman,
And this is from Ros. I will say, I'm just
gonna get a shout out to Ros right now. Rose
is a very responsible listener. And Rose made an excellent
(18:55):
point about this episode in which Ross says, I noticed
in your podcast there was no mention of car insurance.
This is based on sex based pricing that is openly described.
Just because I am a male, I need to pay
more for car insurance. I would think this example would
be worthy of discussion in the podcast, and it would
(19:16):
have been. And yes, we did not deliberately overlook it.
It just didn't come up. So what do you guys think?
Should men have to pay more for car insurance just
because they are met? While taking into account that men
are statistically more likely to get into car Rex, you
guys are more serious ones, serious ones. Yeah, you guys
(19:36):
are a little more miracles drivers statistically, But should they
just have to pay more based on their gender? Well,
if we say yes, that's that's sexism. So no, I
should be on driving record. Yeah. So there yea question answered.
So if you have any questions you'd like else to answer,
you can send us an email at mom Stuff at
(19:57):
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(20:19):
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It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told you?
From House top works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Molly. Who would
(00:21):
you say is the most famous nurse in the school?
I've got you in mind? I would probably say Laurence
Nightingale or Clara Barton. And you know what, those two
nurses seven common that they're both female vaginas. Yeah, they
both they both are women. But one important nurse that
is often left out of popular medical history is a
(00:45):
man named Edward Glavin, who created the Society of Registered
Male Nurses in England in ninety seven because Edward Glavin
recognized that, you know what, even though a lot of
women are nurses, men are nurses too, and we need
our we need a society for ourselves, and they don't
(01:06):
need to be made punchlines and pop culture. If you
saw Meet the Parents, you endured an hour and a
half of male nurse jokes because Ben Stiller's character is
a male nurse and Robert de Niro just cannot let
it go. And so that that's the stereotype is that
there are no male nurses, and if there are, there's
something kind of weird about them. Yeah, like their name
(01:26):
might be gay Lord fokker Um. So that's the question
we wanted to investigate, is why does this stereotype persist,
Why do we think of nurses as women? Why is
nursing considered women's work, and what are the implications of
that and kind of like with the home podcast, we
uncovered some tense relationships between very female dominated industry sector
(01:51):
I nursing and feminism, which we'll get to in a minute.
So there's a lot of a lot of interesting stuff
we found in this guess. So shall we start with
some history? Kristen, Of course I love history now, you know,
when I was researching nursing history, I expected to find
like really old articles about the beginning of time and nursing,
(02:12):
you know, during the Crusades and the like. But you know,
most nursing history articles start with Florence Nightingale mid eighteen hundreds.
So that's that's where the history, I guess, of modern
nursing begins, and it's what really cements this association of
women and nursing. But if we go back in history,
(02:33):
way way back and dime. We have in the fourth
and the fifth centuries with the monastic movement, a lot
of these monks are the earliest nurses. They're the ones
going out and um doing the doing the caretaking. And
we have the founding of things like the Order of St.
John of Jerusalem and the Nights of St. John and Jerusalem,
(02:56):
which led to the St. John Ambulance Association, which all
relates back to these male orders of nursing, uh, caregivers, providers,
nursing writers. So until Old Florence Nangel comes along, it
might have been a monk or someone in a monastic
order providing care. The women who did the nursing were
considered very low status, uh sometimes akin to prostitutes. The
(03:21):
scholars words not mine, uh you know the people who
the women who nurse were just you know, it was
not a good reputation to have, and it was because
at the time, if you needed nursing, hopefully you're wealthy
enough to have your family take care of you. So um.
Old Florence comes along to the Victorian era, the height
of it where women aren't educated because it's considered pretty pointless.
(03:42):
Their brains wouldn't hold any information. Florence happened to have
a father who wanted to educate his daughters even though
he really wanted a son. But um and Florence really
took to education. She she wrote some essay where she
positive that Victorian women went mad because they were so
bored not having occupations. So she was very um, much
(04:03):
atypical of her time. She turned down an engagement from
a guy she seemed to love, but she just felt
that that was going to stand in her way of
being a woman of importance. And very early on she
realized that she liked nursing strangers, even though that was
frowned upon. Yeah, and then we have a war, the
Carimean War with between Britain and Russia, and she noticed
(04:26):
that all these Russian soldiers were getting much better care
than the British soldiers, and Florence Nightingale was outraged for countrymen.
She saw her opportunity. She went over and started organizing
the hospitals where the British soldiers were kept during the war,
and she became when as the Lady with the Lamp
because she would go around with her lamp at night
(04:48):
and check on all the male soldiers as they lay sick,
and she really applied a rigorous set of rules to
the hospitals and to the women who worked there. And
it's like you said, Kristen, this kind of reminds of
the home podcast, where these early home EC pioneers were
very much about applying science to homemaking. And that's how
Florence Nightingale felt. She's like, we're going to bring in
these rules about how hospital will look, who works there,
(05:10):
and so on and so forth. She did feel that
women kind of were intuitively meant for this rule, that
they had these ingrained senses of empathy and caring that
made them good nurses, but they also need to go
through a rigorous training to be the best nurses they
could be. Right, So that was the model, the model
that Florence Nightingale established, That was the model that hospitals
(05:33):
adopted and started to run with. But at the same time,
while she was so emphatic about women's natural abilities to nurse,
it also segregated men from being able to nurse as well.
So we have this shift from you know, the early
fifth sixth centuries and onward up until um, let's see
(05:55):
around I think like the sixteenth and seventeenth century when
nursing really becomes more are of um the women's domain.
With Florence Nightingale, she was really adamant about keeping the
men out of it, and she also establishes nurses homes
and residence to Holl's women um who were nursing students
and nursing. That prevents men from being able to get
(06:16):
the nursing education as well because they don't have a
place to stay. And this will continue on. You know,
it probably still happens a day where a nursing school says,
you know, we don't have male bathrooms because the teachers
are female, the students are female. There's no there's no
way for you to come here, male student. And so
people who adopt the Nightingale model, everyone adopted adopts it
because those British soldiers did so well and got so
(06:37):
much publicity. They set up these schools within the hospitals,
not within a college or university for women to go
and become trained as nurses. They were taught by other nurses,
so it's it's a very um female dominated model from
the top down. And you know, they worked with the
doctors who are male and the patients. You know when
one article kind of posits that it was this very
Victorian family where the doctors were the male leaders. They
(07:00):
were the fathers, and nurses were the mothers who obeyed
what the doctors did, and the patients were the children
under everyone's care. But then the formal segregation of women
and men in nursing happens in Britain with the Nurses
Act of nineteen nineteen that can find men to a
separate register, and so they were set aside. You couldn't
(07:24):
register as a male nurse, and you just you could
not go and say I'm a male nurse. And also
it's around this time that male nurses are relegated to
asylums and mental health wards, whereas women are doing more
of the main healthcare type of work. Right, because men
are super strong, you know, they fall back on another
fall back on another gender stereotype, and you know, somewhat
(07:46):
true about physical strength of men. They were the ones
who could hold down those unruly mentally ill patients. And
so then when you think about someone like Nurse Ratchet
in one Flever the Cuckoo's Nest, she's very manly. You know,
they we can talk, you know, for days about how
nurses are depicted in pop culture, but that particular one
shows that people thought really strong, masculine people needed to
(08:07):
work with the mentally ill, and that further serves to
divide people who are working in hospitals or nursing homes
from people who are working in mental health areas. So
because of that gender segregation, we have people like Edward Glavin,
who I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, who
in nineteen thirty seven starts up the Society of Registered
(08:29):
Male Nurses because he was outraged pretty much the lack
of educational opportunities for men who wanted to pursue nursing.
And also in the US, I thought this was interesting.
It wasn't until nineteen seventy one that men in the
American Men formed a similar association called the American Assembly
(08:49):
for Men in Nursing. But because that stereotype gets set
so quickly after Florence Nightingale takes charge of this nursing profession,
you know, they become they're such minorities, and when when
a male wants to pursue nursing, they quickly get labeled
as an other. There's a huge stereotype that male nurses
are gay um. So you know, pretty much through the
(09:11):
early nine to about nineteen sixty, that's that's the stereotype,
is there's something wrong with the man who wants to
be a nurse. He should probably be a doctor. Right.
And even still, male nurses are excluded from helping out
with obstetrics work, um, childbirth things like that. Like when
you think about the maternity ward and you go see
the room with all little babies in it, and who's
taking care of them? Female nurses? You don't see male
(09:33):
nurses up in there, right. And you know, I was
reading one article where a male nurse was talking about
how he worked in pediatrics and he'd walk in to
take care of the child, and the child say, you're
not a woman. I mean, it's it's ingrained so early
on that your nurse is going to be female. So
now we're up to about nineteen sixts it's a problem.
Men like Edward Glavener try and deal with it. Along
comes Second Way feminism. I feel like this this transition
(09:56):
along comes Second Way Feminism seven and so many of
our podcasts. But it really, you know, it's significant because
here here's a statistic that we found in a study
in the Journal of Advanced Nursing from nineteen fifty eight
to nineteen sixty only one percent of nurses were men,
but in comparison, six and a half percent of physicians
(10:16):
and two percent of dentists were women. So we're starting
to see the shift of women breaking through the more
male dominated um medical fields and two doctors being doctors
and dentists, whereas men are still having so much trouble
breaking into this female industry. Right. And you know what
(10:38):
a lot of people wish would have happened is that
when these feminists came along and started saying, hey, women,
you can be the best you can be. You can
be a doctor, you educated, don't be a nurse, don't
be a sissy nurse, be a doctor, you really put
down the field of nursing because they were like, women
have always been nurses, so there must be something wrong
with it. And I think that has really hurt the feeld.
Like with the Home Back podcast, I think this is
(10:59):
a which faults of stuct my feminism is that they
didn't bring men into nursing and they only urged women
to become doctors, because nursing and being a doctor to
different professions, right, and while I can see that it's
troubling to h here Florence Nightingale say things like, well,
women are meant to be nurses because we're just natural caregivers,
(11:21):
you know, we're just maternal giving people, so we're we're
cut out for this kind of work. I can see
all that's difficult, but you can't have a problem with that,
and just at the same by the same token, disregard
all of the contributions to healthcare and uh medical history
that nurses have provided for us. And what the feminists
do is they kind of see medicine as a hierarchy
(11:43):
with the nurses at the very bottom, which is, you know,
often how they're paid. They receive low salaries in a hospital,
they might be seen on the lowest round despite doing
so much of the work. But the feminists very much
see this hierarchy where it's nursing at the bottom, doctors
at the top. So naturally they want all the women
who are interested in me to become doctors. And it
really hurts the nursing profession because it further sort of
(12:04):
stigmatizes it as something that you know, is something that
you know, the lowest of the low do despite the
fact that it's a very meaningful profession that we need,
you know, our best people in ingriding men, right, And
I mean just thinking about it when you and I
were chatting about this topic earlier, I mean, how how
(12:24):
often do you see a nurse practitioner compared to a doctor?
So much more often? I know my nurse much better
than I know my doctor. And because of this, in
the Nurse Delegates um U in the British Public Service
Union elected to drop the image of Fort Florence Nightingale
as the patron Saint of nurses because they felt that
(12:46):
she represents a quote negative and backward element of nursing.
And it's just interesting to think about this, this tension
within the nursing field, because from the public perspective, we
think of Florence Nightingale is this wonderful figures, the lady
with the lamb. She was one of the most revered
figures in popular women's history, so of course that's great,
(13:08):
but once you get into acual nursing, and one of
the reasons that group sided for dropping Nightingale was that she,
you know, didn't really recognize the value of mental health nursing, which,
as we mentioned, where all the men were stuck. And
you know, she was sort of that pioneer of nursing
comes naturally to women, not men, So you know, maybe
idolizing her leaves the men out of it. But you
know it's interesting, is uh this paper that you talked
(13:31):
about in the Journal of Events Nursing, Kristen talked about how,
you know, wars or times when men can become nurses
just because it's so needed. Um, but the way that
they attract men is so much different than the way
that they try to recruit women. You know, there were
a lot of examples of during the war, they'd have
like these really manly posters like be a man, be
(13:51):
a nurse. Yeah, are you men enough to be a nurse?
Like do you love science, then you will be a
good nurse, whereas women were not recruited with things like
science and going to war. You know, women were told
this is a job that you can do and have
a family because you can move wherever, your husband a job,
you can schedule your work around the time your kids
are in school, whereas men, you know, very quickly to
(14:12):
get men into the field, people were saying, well, you
can be in charge of all the nurses. You can
be a male nurse and be in charge because you've
got the caring skills, but you've also got all those
masculine skills that the female nurses still have, right and
that and that family friendly angle of nurses. That's you know,
that marketing pitch to two women to become nurses is
yet another point of tension between feminism and nursing, because
(14:34):
you know, it's like, well why, you know, well, why
should we why should the women have to be the
ones only looking out for you know, how their profession
fits into their family lifestyle. And this article makes the
point Kristen that you know, because of the reason that
uh nursing with saltswoman is this family friendly position. That
was even more reason that if you had a male nurse,
(14:55):
to put him in charge, because he wouldn't have to
worry about his family, he could be the administrator who
is there forty hours a week, whereas you know, you
can't depend on the female nurse. So even in trying
to get more male nurses involved and putting them in
leadership roles, it kind of just steps over the women
who had already been serving as nurses for all those years.
(15:17):
And even though there are those lingering stereotypes about you know,
the gay lord fokker thing with with male nurses. It's
a good idea for people male or female to pursue
nursing because it is one of the fastest growing industry
sectors in the US the aging baby bimmer population. So
(15:38):
you know, the medical field needs nurses, and nursing is
certainly not a one size fits all kind of profession.
They're not only different um duties and different settings for
nursing obviously, but there are also different educational avenues that
you can get in with from a from licensed practical nursing,
it's more of an on the job training under the
(15:59):
supervisi and of registered nurses and physicians all the way
up to advance practice registered nurse and doctoral degree so
you can get your PhD in nursing. Right, you can
do just a realm of education opportunities, and then you
can have your choice of a wide array of ride
array of places to work from a hospital, UH, a
doctor's office or clinic and nursing home. You can work
(16:19):
in other people's home as a home nurse. I can
work in public health. You can work in an office
taking care of office workers, so it's such this it's
such a broad career. Anyone who's ever been to a
doctor or hospital knows how much work these these nurses do.
But you know, that stigma still remains, not just for
male nurses, but kind of for all nurses. Yeah, just
the idea of them being subordinate to their the doctor's subordinates, right,
(16:43):
And it's just and you know a lot of people
say that that is because that that that stigma persists
because it is quote unquote women's work, that it's something
that all women can do because they can all just
take care of your blah blah, no big deal, And
it's really unfortunate. I wish that uh we can right here,
you and I can give nurses the shout out that
they deserve, though I'm sure they would rather take a
bigger salary or more respect from their coworkers. But nurse
(17:05):
as we silly you. Yeah, maybe you know, instead of
on the on the sitcom that everyone loves to hate Scrubs,
perhaps they could have had Zach Brass character be training
for a nurse instead of a doctor and really gotten
a gender friendly message home to all of the people
out there watching. Just an idea, I mean, if if
only we had sitcom time machines, Molly, the things that
(17:28):
we could do well Christmas. I once learned from a
popular hit song, the future is still on written. So
one of our listeners out there might have the perfect
idea for a new show that will highlight the plight
of male and female ourselves. I'd watch it. I await,
I await your contributions listener. And you know, Chris and
(17:48):
I did want to read one email that touched on
something you brought up. This is an email from Meg
and she writes about something we often do on the
podcast where when we talk about a health issue, we
often end with, you know, talk to your doctor, make
a doctor's appointment. You know, we say that a lot
because we're not medical experts. She writes, I realized that
(18:09):
I haven't visited with an empty at my doctor's office
in the last ten years. I have changed practices, visited
different clients in different states, and the pattern is still
the same. I always see a nurse practitioner or an
advanced practice r in um. I wait the time when
I will hear you say, make an appointment with your
nurse practitioner. So we should start doing that on our
health podcast more inclusive see see a Medical Professional. Thank
(18:32):
you Meg. Maybe two days of the Day, beginning of
the future that is yet unwritten. Well, I've got a podcast.
Oh not a podcast, I've got an email here on
our episode on whether it costs more to be a woman,
And this is from Ros. I will say, I'm just
gonna get a shout out to Ros right now. Rose
is a very responsible listener. And Rose made an excellent
(18:55):
point about this episode in which Ross says, I noticed
in your podcast there was no mention of car insurance.
This is based on sex based pricing that is openly described.
Just because I am a male, I need to pay
more for car insurance. I would think this example would
be worthy of discussion in the podcast, and it would
(19:16):
have been. And yes, we did not deliberately overlook it.
It just didn't come up. So what do you guys think?
Should men have to pay more for car insurance just
because they are met? While taking into account that men
are statistically more likely to get into car Rex, you
guys are more serious ones, serious ones. Yeah, you guys
(19:36):
are a little more miracles drivers statistically, But should they
just have to pay more based on their gender? Well,
if we say yes, that's that's sexism. So no, I
should be on driving record. Yeah. So there yea question answered.
So if you have any questions you'd like else to answer,
you can send us an email at mom Stuff at
(19:57):
how stuff works dot com. You can also post it
on our land page on Facebook, and you can also
tweet us at momb stuff Podcasts. And finally, if you'd
like to keep up with us during the week, we're
blogging over at stuff Mom Never Told You on how
stuff works dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics.
(20:19):
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