[brian]

There are still some vocations in China which are seemingly forbidden to one gender or the other, like nursing for males.
Nursing has been an occupation in China for more than a century, since the establishment of the first western hospital in the 19th century.
Though its concepts and contents keep evolving, male nurses have consistently accounted for a very tiny proportion of the whole profession, said Yang Fengxian, director of the nursing department of the Gansu Provincial People's Hospital.
As a matter of fact, male nurses are extremely rare not only in the hospitals of central and western Chinese cities like Nanchang and Lanzhou, but also in metropolises like Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Many hospitals have no male nurses, Yang said. In Lanzhou, capital of northwestern Gansu Province, only one of the six municipal hospitals has male nurses.
The Gansu Provincial People's Hospital in Lanzhou, the province's biggest comprehensive hospital, has 353 nurses, only three of whom are men, all older than 50 years.
But there are no accurate figures for the total number of male nurses in China's other provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.
Yang said she was certain that the percentage of male nurses is very small. Apart from some specialized hospitals like psychiatric centers, male nurses are seldom seen in comprehensive hospitals, let alone smaller ones.
The situation is totally different in some other countries. In Australia, the ratio of registered male nurses was 8.7 percent of the total in 1999. The United States reported 5.4 percent males on its nursing staff in 2000 and Britain's proportion of male nurses was 10.21 percent in 2002.
The major reason for the tiny number of male nurses in China is the historical social bias that nursing, just like pre-school teaching, is a profession only suited for females, said Bai Fengxia, fundamental medical care expert at Lanzhou University.
The bias has brought pressure on schools to not train male nurses; made hospitals hesitant to employ male nurses; and left patients unwilling to choose male nurses, Bai said.
Experts say there should be no single-gender professions in the world, but also acknowledge that it will take a long time to dissuade people of their deep-rooted bias.
Jin Zhongjie, headmaster of the Gansu Health School, says the problem of China's tiny male nurse proportion will never be fundamentally solved unless reform is carried out in the country's medical and nursing system.
In many western countries, he noted, patients first come to the nurses when hospitalized and then choose doctors with the counsel of the nurses.
But the situation is the opposite in China. Nurses here are subordinate to doctors. They normally only follow doctors' advice to give injections, send medicines and measure patients' temperatures.
Most Chinese nurses graduate from secondary nursing schools, and few have higher educational background, Jin said. Having less vocational knowledge and skills, they are put in a de facto inferior position to doctors.
China's hospitals always tend to pay more attention to medical treatment, neglecting the role of nursing results in a situation that fails to win nurses the recognition and respect that they deserve, said Fu Baoshan, director of the nursing department of the Third People's Hospital in Lanzhou.

Source: Male nurses remain a rarity [EastDay.com,China]