Gender Equality In Nursing Essay

Recently, the world is moving to an era that gender equality has to be made in most of the aspects. There are multiple controversies about gender differences leading to different career choices. Male nurses having fewer population than female nurses is one of the most debatable topic in this issue. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2009 shows that only 5.8% of U.S nurses is men ("Men In Nursing: Being A Male Nurse - Statistics And Discrimination"). Therefore, this research essay will analyze and discuss the reasons that would cause this gender imbalance in nursing. Firstly, the first possible reason that causes men to choose other careers except nursing is the influence of traditional gender roles. People expect men to do

Statistics show that only 2% and 0.4% of male nurses in family planning and obstetrics as well as public health and school health respectively. This shows that it would be hard for men to give treatments for female patients in sensitive areas. It would be better if female nurses take care of those, because it is female’s duties in that past that taking care of other female’s sensitive zones and it could be impossible for male nurses to be as equal as female nurses in this field. Even though, the gender equality is established world wide recently, there are still some places, some situation and some fields that men could not be as equal as the women and the other way around it. Asian countries, where tradition still remains popular, is an excellent example ("Equality And Discrimination In Asia And The Pacific (Asia And The Pacific)"). Gender equality is not taken seriously in Asia and it leads to men having full time office jobs and management positions while women have to work as part time servants and taking care of other people’s health and problems are mainly women duty. That is why men could not

A research shows that the gender differences and its boundary prevent male practitioners to be as equal as female practitioners (Christensen and Knight 98-99). Their study aims on nursing students in the New Zealand and its findings are men could not be able to cope with male patients and female patients (Christensen and Knight 98-99). The findings show that a male nursing student, who has 2 years of study, was being denied to access a girl school, where his class supposed to practise their nursing skills. He could not even step in the playground while kids were around due to gender limitation and people think it was a necessity act in order to prevent something that they could not predict that could harm the children, but it was fine for female nursing students to practise in that place (Christensen and Knight 98-99). Thus, being a man in the nursing major has a huge amount of limitations and it is clear that why many men choose to not major in nursing. In addition, an article mentions about male nurses’ tokenism in hospital setting that differs from the female that male nurses are not as equal as their colleagues, female nurses, because there were a huge amount of events that were held in hospitals for the staff but it was not men included (Floge and Merril 933). This could explain that the gender equality is a problem to preventing men become nurses.