More Male Nurses Can Improve Healthcare Quality and Unravel Myths about Nursing

Achieving gender diversity in nursing is the next step forward in the progress of our nation’s health and well-being, affirming that in healthcare and everywhere else, diversity is a driver of quality. For many reasons, solving the gender imbalance in nursing could be an important missing piece to improve the quality of patient care and accelerate the profession in reaching its full potential.

To begin, if any population group is underrepresented in any profession, for whatever reason, you won’t get the best possible job candidates to choose from, so you won’t be able to hire or promote the best talent. Ensuring the largest possible talent pool is essential to quality. The fact that only 13% of nurses are male indicates there are many potentially excellent nurses who are not entering the profession.

With consumer demand for healthcare services projected to far outweigh the supply of nurses, there are other important reasons why the profession needs to increase the number of male nurses. As part of a long-range solution to the nursing shortage, greater numbers of men pursuing careers in nursing could provide some relief.

An influx of male applicants could help create pressure to expand nursing programs. And if nursing becomes more diverse, it could become a greater force for social and public policy change, including greater investment in educating more nurses.

Though genders share many physical and behavioral conditions, they also experience gender-specific diseases, injuries, symptoms, and health determinants. And the gender of practitioners makes a difference in diagnoses and treatment.

Research shows, for example, that female heart attack patients experienced better outcomes in emergency departments that had a higher percentage of female physicians, and that male physicians are more effective in treating female heart attack patients when they work with more female colleagues and treat more female patients. It’s clear that better gender equity and experience among practitioners have a beneficial effect on patient outcomes.

On a larger scale, the health of populations could be improved if nurses, the occupation with the largest scale of hands-on patient care, better represent the people they serve. Care quality is dependent on the relationship between practitioner and patient; practitioner characteristics that match patient populations could be key to more effective treatment and successful outcomes.

More men in nursing can also help explore some of the unfortunate myths that surround nursing. Nurses are scientists as well as caregivers; as a scientific profession, all genders have equal ability to excel in nursing. There is no gender predisposition to the profession. More male nurses would help shift the focus on the nursing profession to a balanced view of science and caring.

False stereotypes about nursing begin with the misleading beliefs that women are more nurturing than men and that the most important aspect of nursing is to comfort people. These two misrepresentations continually reinforce each other. In searching for a reason why nursing is predominantly female, people fall back on the myth that women are more nurturing.

The gender, nurturing, and “soft science” myths about nursing are long-standing and deeply rooted. Increasing the percentage of male nurses would help change them.

Increasing the number of male nurses has the potential to unravel many myths about nursing. But more importantly, society needs more male nurses, along with other increases in diversity in the profession, so that it will mirror the patient populations and potentially improve the quality of care and outcomes.