Discrimination against males in the nursing profession.

[Halim F. Dagher]

Stereotyping male nurses have reached a disreputable level in my society and beyond, to the point that it started to affect the mindset and the efficacy of male nurses. An eye opener should be addressed on this topic in order to tackle and seal this "infringement". The use of both qualitative and quantitative data is necessary to acquire a stone based stand - interviews, surveys, content analysis, participant observation, secondary data analysis, case studies, meta-analysis, statistics and others. In addition, I hope the outcome of this topic would be to reach definitive answers and solutions rather than fashioning and escalating a new controversial topic.

I wrote this topic for an English research paper and I would like to hear from male and female nurses about this topic - any stories, quotes, personal point of views and real life situations would be helpful.

Thanks in return

[ArtClassRN, ADN, RN]

I've seen one case of unfair treatment against a male RN. I work with a male nurse, "Dirk" who has sub-par clinical skills. He tries, but he just doesn't have very good background or experience, and doesn't really try to learn or improve. He is written up often, looked down upon by coworkers, and is the target of many denigrating comments. I have heard more than once "Oh I can't put that patient there..Dirk is there."

The thing is, he really isn't any worse than at least 5 other female RNs on my floor. These 5 range from burnout cases who just choose not to do their jobs, to newer nurses who basically just want to get paid for showing up and do as little nursing work as possible. They often just refuse to do their jobs - or even acknowledge what their job entails. They are, by my reckoning, much worse than Dirk.

The habits of these female nurses with poor clinical performance are well known. However, they are not written up or discussed like Dirk is. I strongly suspect that this discrepancy is because he is male.

Dirk certainly deserves the criticism he gets and if he works hard, he can certainly improve as a nurse. His performance is independent of the other nurses I mention. The thing is - no one is even pretending to hold the female nurses accountable.