There are definitely some pretty serious barriers - the male nurses I've talked to reported some of them and that their opinions seem to carry more weight. They

There are definitely some pretty serious barriers - the male nurses I've talked to reported some of them and that their opinions seem to carry more weight. They're not mutually exclusive. The most common negative complaint I've heard is that, despite being nurses, they often get cast as "muscle", holding down patients and the like, which is both dangerous (struggling patients, needlestick, etc.) and also pretty antithetical to the reasons most nurses chose their profession.