LinkedIn News August 29, 2024
By Beth Kutscher, Editor at Large at LinkedIn News
Jason Dunne , chief academic officer at the Arizona College of Nursing, is one of the comparatively few male nurses in academia. He’s been on a mission to increase the number of men in the profession, challenging gender norms and recruiting more men into nursing schools.
W. Jason Dunne — like many men considering a career in healthcare — initially thought he wanted to be a doctor, and set his sights on medical school. But when he chose to pursue his undergraduate degree in nursing, he upended his entire plan.
“Medicine was more about the disease, treating the specific nature of why the person presented,” he told me. “But nursing gets to look at all of these pieces — emotional, psychosocial — that make the person tick and often contribute to health or illness.”
Dunne is now chief academic officer at the Arizona College of Nursing, one of the comparatively few male nurses in academia. He’s been on a mission to increase the number of men in the profession, recently authoring an op-ed in MedPage Today about the urgency of challenging gender norms and recruiting more men into nursing schools.
While the number of male nurses has increased over time, progress has been slow and halting in recent years — at a time when the need for nurses has perhaps never been more critical.
Among registered nurses, men comprised about 12% of the workforce in 2022, up from 10% in 2018, government data shows. But the share of men enrolled in undergraduate nursing programs held steady in that time period, at just under 13%, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN).
Stereotypes and gender norms are one factor keeping men away from the bedside, Dunne notes, adding that there are ways for workplaces to be more inclusive. It’s an equity issue, he says — research shows that patient outcomes improve when their healthcare providers look like them.
Men who do enter the profession tend to gravitate toward higher-acuity — and higher-paying — specialties. About 15% of advanced practice nurses in 2022 were men, up from 11% in 2018. They also hold leadership positions in disproportionate numbers.
(And like in other industries, male nurses are still paid more than women, even when adjusting for the type of job and work setting.)
When I asked Dunne about those disparities — and whether it’s important to keep men at the bedside — he said that one area to focus on would be to bring more men into education, to develop role models and mentors and reach students as early as middle or high school.
The number of men in nursing education was just 7.8% in 2022, up from 6.5% in 2018, according to the AACN data.
Dunne’s own career brought him to academia after he became a preceptor while working in the intensive care unit. “I absolutely fell in love with the idea of teaching new nurses the skill and the art and science of nursing,” he said.
You can read our conversation below. And tell me, how do we recruit more men into nursing — and what can workplaces do to support them?
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
LinkedIn News: Why is it important to bring more men into nursing?
Dunne: The nursing shortage is outstanding. It can’t be solved by one single thing, but there’s one huge gap that I think could make a major difference. And that’s more male nurses. As of 2022 data, about 12% of the 4.7 million nurses in the US are men; that’s around about 560,000 nurses overall. That’s really good in comparison to 1970, when we were at 2.7%. But still we have a long way to go. If you look at it from a gender parity perspective, if we could attract just as many men into nursing as we had women, there wouldn’t be a nursing shortage; we would address it no problem.
Nursing requires a diverse skill set, from technical competence to emotional intelligence, and these skills are not gender specific. And there’s a lot of research over the years that shows that when patients look like nurses, they are understood by their nurses, and patient care outcomes improve.
LinkedIn News: Your MedPage Today piece suggests that internalized stigma is part of what prevents men from considering a career in nursing.
Dunne: It’s historically been a gendered job, predominantly female. We have made progress, but despite the progress, there are persistent gender stereotypes that discourage men from entering the profession. I also believe that having fewer men in the profession may deter younger men from entering. Who can mentor and inspire other men to enter the profession?
When I look at my experience in nursing, and where men typically gravitate, they’re in the high-acuity areas, like the emergency room. The media has also played into this phenomenon as well, reinforcing stereotypes by showing women as nurses, men as doctors.
LinkedIn News: Not only do male nurses gravitate toward certain specialties, but when you look at nursing leadership in particular, men are overrepresented by the numbers. Should one of the goals be to keep more men at the bedside?
Dunne: You’re correct that men are holding leadership positions at a higher percentage than their female counterparts. In my experience, men really want to move forward: What’s the next step? How do I advance?
I’d love to see more men gravitate to education, where I’ve been for the last 20 years, because I think this is where we can truly make a difference in terms of feeding the pipeline and having role models who are out there helping with recruitment and retention and trying to help shift the landscape of what nursing is about.
LinkedIn News: Let’s talk about some of the solutions.
Dunne: We need to really get back to highlighting the benefits of nursing. It’s fulfilling work. It’s good pay out of the gate for students coming out with a bachelor’s degree. The demand is there; we have job security.
Public awareness campaigns are needed to highlight male nurses and their contributions to the healthcare system. Nursing, if you ask my opinion, is built out of a fundamental basis of values — caring, diligence, teamwork, camaraderie, service, leadership — and they transcend genders. Let’s talk about those things a little more globally. Promoting inclusivity is another important piece [as well as having] male nurses engaging in mentorship programs to inspire and create visibility for other young men wanting to join the profession.
LinkedIn News: I once interviewed a nurse in a psychiatric unit, who said that one of the downsides of being a male nurse is that he’d often get called in when a patient was acting violently. Violence in healthcare has been increasing over the years, and he felt like he was always the one who had to go into these traumatizing situations.
How can hospitals be more supportive of men at the bedside?
Dunne: When we talk about creating these inclusive works workplaces for everybody, it really goes back to policy and processes. If we’re always looking to men to be the strongarm, how is that truly being inclusive and representative of men in nursing and what we bring to the table?We need nurses more than ever, and I think that nursing educators and healthcare providers have that shared responsibility to combat the stereotypes, to embrace the diversity and strive towards creating a nursing workforce that reflects the patients we serve. Once the nursing workforce looks like the patients, outcomes improve. What patients need most in abundance is diverse skilled professionals who can provide that high quality care.
Information in this post is accurate as of .