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Is it a problem that the nursing profession is dominated by women? If so, why?
by gms 14y ago
Is it a problem that the nursing profession is dominated by women? If so, why?
- Volpe 14y agoI don't know anything about the nursing industry. But I would comment, that increased diversity (whether it is gender/race/age/etc) always yields benefits as you have a more diverse range of viewpoints to draw from. So it is always a problem when one group is over(or under) represented in a given area.
- LOLtampicoLOL 14y agoBy extension, do you support "empowering" the employment of men in a female dominated profession by decree with the same zeal you show here toward women in tech?
- s_baby 14y agoWhat about women in coal mines and crab fishing boats? It's true that a man has greater mobility towards the top of the career ladder but this "privilege" also exposes him to the much more likely risk of ending up on the bottom of the ladder. It's not equal to have proportional gender representation in only desirable jobs.
- majormajor 14y agoBy "the bottom of the ladder" do you mean economically? Is your claim that women have a higher earnings floor then men? Could you provide figures?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- s_baby 14y agoIt's not something you can completely measure economically. A coal miner makes decent money but how do you put a price tag on black lung or being crushed to death? >When I did the research for a book called The Myth of Male Power I discovered a Glass Cellar that holds far more men than the Glass Ceiling. The Glass Cellar consists of the hazardous jobs and the worst jobs (minimum security, low pay, bad conditions). The hazardous jobs-or Death Professions-result in 93% of the people who are killed at work being men. Of the 25 professions that the Jobs Rated Almanac rates as the worse professions, 24 have in common the fact that they constitute 85% or more males (welders, roofers, etc.). http://www.warrenfarrell.com/labor_day_art.htm http://www.warrenfarrell.com/labor_day_art.htm Also need to consider the other costs externalized on marginalized men. Men are ~5 times more likely to die from suicide. Men are more likely to be homeless. They are more likely to be pariah of society. They live 7 years less than a women when a century ago the difference was 2 years. These are all costs externalized on men based on the traditional idea that men are strong/privileged and need to "man up".
- Volpe 14y agoI'd be cautious of using a 'Glass Cellar' as an excuse not to act on gender inequality.
- s_baby 14y agoI agree, the ratio is so skewed that the possibility of legitimate discrimination should be considered. But consider this. We're experiencing the first generation of men that will be less educated than their fathers. Women are outpacing men in college education and literacy rates and this divide continues to grow. If we continue to systematically approach "gender equality" from such a lopsided perspective we're all going to hurt as a society. We're on the path to resembling Eastern Europe. Where the social cost of being a man is so high they are disproportionately dying and creating a gap in eligible bachelors.
- sopooneo 14y agoThe benefits of diversity come with costs. Shared viewpoint and culture makes things much simpler. Things people consider universal ("well that's just common sense!", "It's about respect!") reasonably often turn out not to be universal. The very notion of the benefit of diversity is itself not held by all cultures.
- mangodrunk 14y agoDo you have evidence for increasing diversity helps?
- sp332 14y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4240716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4240716
- darren 14y agoThe Impact of Gender Composition on Team Performance and Decision-Making: Evidence from the Field http://www.econ.upf.edu/~apesteguia/Gender_Teams.pdf http://www.econ.upf.edu/~apesteguia/Gender_Teams.pdf "Looking across the performance distribution, we find that for undergraduates, three women teams are outperformed throughout... For MBA students, at the top, the best performing group is two men and one woman." http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea... "The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better." http://www.20-first.com/968-0-lbs-study-shows-addition-of-women-to-teams-improves-performance.html?download=grattonreportinnovative_potential_nov_2007.pdf http://www.20-first.com/968-0-lbs-study-shows-addition-of-wo... "The optimal percentage for the gender balance of men and women on teams is 50:50. Neither men nor women flourish when in a minority on teams. When in a minority, women tend to network outside whereas men tend to become less motivated. Having a slight majority of women on teams (about 60%) improves the self-confidence of the team." I think the evidence is pretty clear. Anecdotally, I've seen the best performance out of mixed teams. All men teams and all women teams generally don't work out so well.
- gyardley 14y agoPeople are quite good at selecting people like them - in my experience, it's quite possible to have a nice diverse group of people, all of whom have exactly the same viewpoints. I'm not objecting to this proposal in any way - nothing wrong with more investors - but there's no doubt in my mind that the female tech entrepreneurs who'll benefit from this will have worldviews very similar to their male counterparts. If you really want diversity of viewpoints, you'll need to discriminate on harder-to-nail-down concepts like socioeconomic class or culture.
- DeepDuh 14y agoNot to mention the physical issues. My wife was nursing and according to her the inability to carry most of the patients is one of the bigger problems in that field. The way it works now you need a group of male employees basically just for carrying people - not a very popular job. They try to solve it with robots in Japan, but it's at least another 10 years until those solutions are really viable. 50% male nurses would certainly help there.
- majormajor 14y agoI have a friend who's a nurse. He's told me that he's gotten some shit from people because of his profession. From other guys who aren't nurses. Weird, huh? But I've seen more hostility or unintentionally discouraging behavior towards female programmers from male ones than he's mentioned ever encountering from female nurses, so in that regard it's less of a problem. Yet he's also mentioned that the number of males in the field is increasing, and that there are, in fact, efforts being made to get more men into the field. Why would a limited labor pool for any profession be a good thing? And why should I believe that the current distribution in a very young field represents a natural equilibrium?
- roguecoder 14y agoWe address this is every gender thread on hacker's news. Yes, it is a problem. Yes, people are trying to fix it. Yes, including creating male-only nursing scholarships and spaces and community groups. None of which has anything to do with programming. I don't know if you think you are being clever or if you are just repeating a talking point, but either way it's a derailment that has been addressed a hundred times before if you cared to do a little bit of homework.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoThis entire conversation has been said 100 times. It's interesting how the original article throws something at least kinda new into the mix, but this whole thread just heads right back to the same old grounds.
- saraid216 14y agoThat's because it's not new. Read the comments on the original article. If a magic solution was enough, it would have been fixed already and no one would bother talking about the non-issue.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- gms 14y agoActually my intention was neither; I simply asked a question I am curious about the answer to. Why is it a problem that nursing is dominated by women?
- saraid216 14y agoThat's not a problem. The problem is that people believe nursing is supposed to be a woman's job, and that a male nurse is thus unmanly for freely choosing to become one. These beliefs are wrong. They are sexist. Full stop. An indicator of the prevalence of these beliefs is the dominance of women in the nursing profession. This is hard, factual, statistical data that we can point to; it's easier to parse than qualitative data, such as stories of males laughing at male nurses for their profession. It is a chicken-and-egg problem. Are blacks more likely to be criminals, or does the expectation that blacks become criminals increase the number of blacks being investigated for crime, leading to a higher rate of discovery? Is it because blacks are systematically discouraged from getting an education, which tends towards lower incomes and higher likelihoods of becoming criminal? These are statistical truths. Absolute? Hardly; they're still mere statistics, which always lie. But statistics are closer to the truth than the dubious anecdotes we had before. They can demonstrate the existence of bias, even if that bias cannot be causatively tied to sexism. And in the end, that demonstration is more proof than the inverse position, the position that the nursing profession should be biased towards women, which really only has the above-mentioned sexist beliefs to fall back on.