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Power in Nursing as Gender Inequality
Nursing is an important part in the health care system, including tasks related to taking care of people with potential health problems. The power issue in nursing consists in gender inequality in this field. In the UK medical system, only 11% of nurses are male, while the rest 89% are female. Moreover, male students in nursing schools are reported to experience more negative feelings like isolation, and they are also with a higher drop out rate compared with female students.

The stereotype of nursing as a feminine profession roots deeply in history when Ms. Nightingale opened her nursing training school in 1860, which served as a model for other nursing education programs across Western countries. Though Nightingale’s efforts in professional nursing training elevated the status of female nurses and provided more career options for unmarried women, the organisation of nursing school was mobilised as a female-oriented system, excluding male students from the career. Most training schools at that time were built by mimicking the environment in religious sisterhood, requiring female students to preserve virtues and to be subordinate to physicians who were mostly males. Thus, nurses were classified as a second class accessory and the ubiquitous stereotypes of female characteristics were extended into the medical world. The mobilised bias of the nurse icon act as indirect coercion, preventing males to enter the nursing world by defining it as a feminine profession. Such stereotypes are also reinforced in popular culture when male nurses are portrayed as homosexual, putting pressure on males who want to pursue a nursing career.

Due to the exclusiveness toward males in early nursing schools and the continuation of education traditions, the language use in nursing is biased against men. For example, in many nursing textbooks, the use of both pronouns and nouns are found in feminine forms, thus assuming all students are female. The use of the phrase “male nurse” also segregates the two genders and marginalise male students in nursing by categorising men as the minority. In addition, it is found out that in nursing training, the ways of communication with patients are usually taught based on the female mode of emotional expression, making male students struggle to find their own ways to establish connections with patients. On the other side, though male nurses took active roles in history like during wartimes, their contributions were rarely recorded in nursing textbooks. Moreover, the percentage of male teachers in nursing schools is only 5%, which is lower than the percentage of males students enrolled. Both the use of gender-biased language and the lack of male role models in nursing education act as power, giving stress to male students and discourage them from continuing to study.