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Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree
- Overtonwindow 9y agoVery good article. My dad was a nurse for 25 years, and I remember in his graduation photo he was the only man with about 30 women.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoI looked for the part about "Their Wives Agree" and didn't find it. What did I miss?
- throw_away 9y ago"Ofer Sharone, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has studied middle-aged white-collar professionals who have lost their jobs. He found that some men who might have been willing to consider lower-paid jobs in typically feminine fields encountered resistance from their wives, who urged them to keep looking. “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”
- tenpies 9y agoThis is even more telling when you consider that the husband's employment status is the best predictor of divorce[1]. I wonder if some jobs result in an even higher incidence of divorce than unemployment. --- [1] http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/aug16asrfeature.pdf http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/au...
- moomin 9y agoSomeone with a shallow familiarity with feminism like myself won't find anything surprising here. That patriarchy (which is a set of commonly held attitudes) disadvantages men as well as women is well understood. That many women have patriarchal attitudes is also well understood. However, don't assume that these things are fixed. Highly feminine occupations such as film editor and software engineer have long since "flipped" to being male-dominated professions. Nursing could easily be next. Or, you know, we could all grow up as a society but I'm seeing no evidence that this is likely to happen.
- PhilWright 9y agoIt is well known that men favor working with things and women favor working with other people. So in a society that provides complete equality you will find that some professions are dominated by a particular sex. Nursing is dominated by women because far more women enjoying working closely with people than men do. That is not going to flip. The feminist idea that all professions should end up with about 50% participation if there is true equality is patent nonsense.
- throwawaycopy 9y agoBeing that we're hairless apes who rely on clothing, fire to break down our food, and a host of other technologies just for basic survival, I'd say our natural biology is pretty damned unimportant when it comes to such high level behavior such as preferred profession in the Western world. Your culture and your language are by far much more responsible for your desires and actions. Just look how easily mankind is swayed by mere words to go to war!
- ableton 9y agoI have thought about this a lot, and yet when you observe little kids, little boys want to play with trucks and cars, and little girls like playing with dolls. Nobody has to tell boys to play with cars or toy guns. They just like them. Obviously everybody's an individual. But by and large I think there are trends at such a young age it's apparent that the gender differences in occupational choices aren't just due to culture.
- moomin 9y agoYour big assumption here is that kids are ignorant of culture and pay no attention to non-explicit signals. This is demonstrably and wholly false.
- ableton 9y agoI think that boys just plain will prefer the cars over the doll if you give them the choice, regardless of culture. The story of David Reimer is instructive. The boy at 22 months had a botched circumcision. So the doctors just chopped off his balls and made a vagina for him. He had a horrible time becoming a "girl" and as soon as he was told he was a boy as a teen immediately reverted and lived the rest of his life as a boy as much as he could. The reason his parents told him anyways was because he threatened to take his own life, hating to see the therapist who was trying to make him act like a girl. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
- tptacek 9y agoWe should rename the profession. "Nurse" is gendered, but also poorly captures the responsibilities of the modern nursing profession. It is batshit crazy that our first line of medical care in the US is medical doctors. For 80% of what ordinary people see doctors for, Nurse Practitioners are superior to doctors: they're more available, can spend more time with patients, and can more easily escalate cases to doctors or specialists than the patients themselves can. What would make a lot of sense to me would be to rename "Nurse Practitioners" to "Associate Doctors".
- mythrwy 9y agoHow about "Flesh Mechanics"? That might get a man or two interested. "Nurse" has mammary overtones.
- majewsky 9y agoThat phrase is quite demeaning to the nurses' subjects, which is probably why you're being downvoted.
- mythrwy 9y agoUnderstandable and no complaints, down-votes taken with a smile and not personally. I don't understand your point about "demeaning" though. Are you saying calling people under nurses care "flesh" is demeaning? Or saying the word "Nurse" has mammary overtones (it does, and I assume some sort of common root) is demeaning? I would have down-voted the comment for being dumb rather than demeaning (admittedly it is kind of a dumb comment). Just struggling to understand demeaning here because I'm not the kind of persons who wants to demean so maybe I should know something I don't.
- majewsky 9y agoThe flesh part. It makes it sound like humans are just a pile of flesh. (And please don't make this into a philosophical debate about whether that captures the human condition because this is clearly not the point.)
- stuaxo 9y agoIs this just in the US? In the UK I have had male and female nurses all over.