I'm a male healthcare worker (cardiac sonographer), and even though there are a lot more women, there were never any barriers for me because of my gender.
If there's a shortage, it's because employers need to pay more, same as every other labor "shortage." Nursing is in demand everywhere, and not everyone has what it takes to do their work. If they could be making more money somewhere else, that's where they'll go.
A couple of years ago, I compared my salary to all my friends in the same field, and found they were all making at least 25% more than me. I asked my work for more money, they said no, so I left. Last I heard they can't find anyone who'll work for so little except fresh grads who can't keep up with the heavy workload nor the high quality demanded by the doctors. And several nurses have told me similar stories.
Came here to say this. So many of my friends are male nurses. The thing that keeps them from sticking around is the pay. There's only so much crap you can take (literal and metaphorical) for a terrible salary. My housemate worked at UNC here in North Carolina. Not only was his pay terrible, he had to pay for on-campus parking. And if there was a sports game, he wasn't allowed to use the parking lot (having to park substantially further away and take a shuttle).
The people running the system are so completely disconnected from the experience of being a nurse that they're destroying the industry from the top down.
It's kind of wild that our system seems to be specifically set up to exploit people who care.
Sociopath who views people as just a barrier to their goals? Promotion to CEO, billion dollar bonus. Millions of tax dollars spent to bail you out of trouble.
Empathetic person willing to literally put your body on the line for other? Shit pay, shit hours, one unlucky break away from destitution.
What's even crazier is the majority of Americans seem to like it this way.
Nursing has become a pretty bad job in modern times, and being a male nurse tends to have more downsides. Exploitation is high in the nursing field, support staff are non-existent, mandatory overtime is common, patient ratios are trending up, break times are non-existent in some areas, being assaulted is increasingly common. Being a male also tends to mean you are expected to do the harder or heavy lifting parts the majority of the time in addition to all the other problems the profession has.
3x12 hrs on 4x days off, or 6 on/8 off, TC pushes into mid/high 100's a few years in, often a union job, hands on outcomes, adrenaline if you want it, AI-protected enough (see: often a union job).
You have to actually like the work though. It's one thing just to recognize that it's a good career with a lot of security and good pay. But if you don't actually like the work, i.e taking care of people when they're at their worst, then you are going to be 100% miserable within 5 years and looking for another career change.
The local hospital had 2 nurses who committed suicide during COVID. Nursing attracts high compassion individuals and then overworks them so that they cannot provide a proper level level of care. Add the stress of a demanding physical job and the stress of shift work and you end up with one of the professions with the highest female suicide rates.
After decades of clicking on different spots on screens and keyboards, the real stress in exchange for that, and now your peers in AI companies have found a way to unemploy you - there's a lot to like with hands on care that does something tangible that tech rarely does.
People you tend to for months or years dying on you gets old really fast though. In my family, the 5 doctors are still working (or kept working until retirement), of the 8 PT, only one isn't working as a PT, but of the 4 nurses only one is still working (she's getting a psych speciality), the other all went another way. Granted, we're not in the US where the nurses are paid more, but the reason to stop wasn't the pay but the moral toll.
Well don't give up your career just yet unless you absolutely love the role of nursing. I'm sure you're thinking the grass is greener right now, but there's a reason why there is a chronic nursing shortage.... It can be a miserable job.
Agreed! Stress in exchange for daily care outcomes I know I did and blood-and-guts adrenaline work has longed ticked the boxes. Tech used to tick the other boxes that I don't care much about anymore especially post AI.
It definitely takes a certain personality type to be good at it. Empathy, discipline, self-control and infectiously friendly.
On the plus side, men do have an advantage regarding size/strength in terms of being able to help disabled people move. I think this is probably part of why a lot of men become EMTs (similar field/training).
Maybe in California. I don't think that's the case in most states, unless you're doing a ton of overtime. I know someone who makes $130K/year in my state, which is amongst the top paying states. Has over a decade of experience.
I suggest you look at where nurses unions are nationwide, and their collective bargaining agreements! Nurse unions aren't just in blue states named California.
Excluding a NP path ($200k+ within a decade of RN licensure if you want it), and factoring in shortages - RN as a team lead makes ~$130k w/ ~4-5 yrs per the CBA I know of. That's without overtime or nights, without a new CBA factoring in the 2020's inflation and shortages after COVID era departures.
NP further swings the math, to include the tuition costs baked in from a cheap in-state school, employer tuition support, and specializing in demand areas like psych.
I’m actually taking prerequisites at a local cc to start an accelerated BS in nursing. Feels like one of the few jobs that’s still going to be in demand.
There's also plumbing, a/c and electrical work... general repairman stuff, etc. Assuming you're okay working hands on and potentially in more stressful environments (weather).
I'm largely with Mike Rowe on this one... it's been a shame the level that people have not been directed into more vocational fields and the level of skilled labor shortages as a result. Higher education has largely been self-serving, not community serving.
Unless there is an actual effort to pay people well for this work, the shortage is a myth and you are spreading a false belief. Mike Rowe is the last person you should be listening to about hard work and trade jobs. He's correct about people getting pushed into college, but he is wrong for trying to make trade work glamorous and manly on TV.
I'm in a skilled trade and see lots of dudes getting their bodies shredded (with no insurance) for $40k a year (in HCOL). Why do that when pushing paperwork or bartending gets you the same money? Yes there certainly are outstanding individuals that can run their own small company and do well, but they probably could do just as well in another field anyway.
As long as the pay stays the same, companies are just gonna gouge harder. You'll be forced to buy worse work for more money since they can't keep good employees on. If you want to actually fix things talk to your GC's and subs heart to heart about paying their guys better
me and you both! i had a big tech job, made enough/seen enough to read the writing on the wall and plus having a way to exit, off to RN before others do.
When I went to school for radiography (X-ray) in 2024 I got an additional scholarship for being a male in a female dominated field (healthcare), I believe it’s pretty common? I think it was apart of the FASFA or something, been a minute though.
The more everyone the better! There are definitely times when it’s nice to have some guys with muscles around when it comes time to transfer a non ambulatory patient to an X-ray or CT table, but the ladies get it done too!
I don't get it. I'm in the rural south and male nurses are common (although it is facility by facility I imagine). Not as many as women, but still, it isn't something I notice anymore.
It feels the same here - I've visited hospitals (as a guest, not a patient) quite a bit over the past year+, and I've noticed quite a few. I think women still outnumber men by at least 2:1, but it's not uncommon.
I'm guessing the goal is to get that parity up to 1:1, or something close.
I see quite a few male nurses too, except for in the birthing and family care suites when my wife gave birth. All women across the several days we were in hospital, with the exception of a few male OBs and lab techs.
When I was a kid, I thought that nurse/doctor was a gender specific term. They went to the same schools, but when they graduated, men were called "doctors" and girls were called "nurses". It was an embarrassing moment when I found out that, no, they are not the same thing.
Thanks, "because cats are girls and dogs are boys" triggered a memory of SNL sketch of a faux-1952 educational film strip "A lady's guide to party planning" from 2009.
When you're short on nurses, trying to invite men isn't DEI.
If we had plenty of qualified nurses, but hospitals made quotas saying that 20% of nurses must be men, that would be DEI.
It's replacing merit (let me sort for "best available nurse" and hire that person) with another attribute (let me sort for "male nurse," then sort for "best available nurse in the male group", and hire that person). If you hire the best available male nurse, you may have passed on the best available nurse. Given the demographics of nursing, seems likely.
Anyway, they're not talking about having a surplus of candidates, so that doesn't apply.
Say a man thinks nursing is for women and not for men. Say an employer wants more nurses irrespective of sex. Is that employer engaging in DEI if they spend more money on male re-education than on recruiting women?
Depends on why they're spending it that way, not whether they're spending it that way.
The problem is the "male re-education" and "recruiting women."
They should just have a recruiting budget and a re-education budget. There should be a way to determine the best spend of the money. Maybe one method of generating a nurse is cheaper, or produces a better quality employee. When you try to have the process generate "at least this percentage of [male/brown/etc] people" instead of just generate the most/best candidates, then you have DEI. The process doesn't produce the most, or best quality employees --it works to force an outcome that is unrelated to employee skill or best business practices.
Look out for organizations in your state, similar to what happened with Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association (AzHHA)... I knew about it a few years before the 2007 settlement as my ex-wife an dMIL were working for a Nurse staffing company at the time.
I have been wondering how long it would start to take before historically female roles would start courting men the way STEM has been courting women the last couple of decades
After years of "why are men dropping out of the workforce" articles it seems we finally are seeing some people come to their senses that yes, you do actually still have to "court" men to enter different careers to make it seem like appealing work for them to do
Could be just me, confirmation bias or whatever but around 2010-2020 it felt like you couldn't go two minutes with tripping over a "we need more women in STEM" article but this is the first I feel I'm ever seeing about "we need more male nurses"
And male teachers have always felt fairly plentiful starting around high school levels to me, and going into university. Not in primary school, but people don't seem to trust adult men around children as a rule so that might be why
Yep, can confirm. I was aggressively recruited for education as a math undergrad. There was no way that was going to happen, too many people view male teachers as inherently predatory.
> I was aggressively recruited for education as a math undergrad.
Was it because you were male or because you were studying math? Many schools struggle to find good math teachers; it's one of the qualifications in perpetual shortage.
> too many people view male teachers as inherently predatory.
I absolutely hate this. It's the same in every field in contact with kids. When I was a youth camp counsellor, a director told me after stuff happened with other counsellors "at least now, I'm sure you are not a predator" (translation here). I know it was a joke, but the place and the way makes are sometimes seen in the field genuinely hit me hard. I remember the sentence and the director face as she said it better than the other counsellors and the overall situation.
Kind of weird you guys are being down-voted. This is absolutely true. I volunteered at the local Boys and Girls club for years and there was always a vibe when any new person or parent came in. Over 30 male working with kids always raises eyebrows. It sucks but it's also reality.
These kinds of programs have existed for decades. You've been wondering about that not because these programs weren't there but because you weren't looking for them.
There are a lot of good reasons why we want more men in nursing. For personal reasons some patients may respond better to interactions with men. Additionally men being on average larger and stronger then women is an advantage in a society with many overweight and obese people.
Two comments about this being fake news, based upon my wife having two nurse friends:
MDs are nationally organized and have a fixed career path. Nurses are more "you do you" career path and if a news story about shortages doesn't specify licenses assume they're scamming you. There's a big difference in supply/demand curves for a state licensed 3-month CNA vs a NP with 30 years experience. Flooding the CNA supply by lowering standards will not magically make 30 year experienced certified APRNs appear, at least not for another decade or two.
Female coded jobs have very short career lengths. There's a reason there's a shortage, management makes everyone quit. Average nurse career length is only 8 years. Its not as bad as public school teacher but its pretty bad. Everyone knows the RN with 20 years experience makes six figures etc. Mostly because management forced 90% of her peers to quit and she'll all thats left and it takes six figure salary to keep her. The high pay is not exactly a glowing endorsement of working conditions LOL. Most whom enter the field will burn out long before they get high pay or "cool jobs".
I would comment that everyone knows their field of expertise is mostly inaccurately described in mass media, but surely every other field is accurately represented. This situation unfortunately applies to all areas of expertise including nursing. Articles like this annoy nurses much like mass media portrays of "computers" and "computer people" annoy us with their inaccuracies.
The number of Medicare funded residency slots are limited by law. Medical schools won't graduate more doctors because residency can't be guaranteed. Who wants to be the med school who graduates doctors with >$100K debt and no path to licensure?
In the 1990s the AMA lobbied congress to get the number of Medicare-funded slots limited. This was done in response to a projected "oversupply" of doctors (preventing a deflationary effect on doctors' compensation). That limit has stuck and now, even though the AMA is lobbying for the removal of the limit, the damage to the supply of doctors has been done and it's a process with a long pipeline.
That's an excellent link for getting down into the details. Thanks for posting it.
> This editorial argues that the long-standing cap on residency slots, originating with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, is the key structural constraint throttling the U.S. physician workforce.
> In the 1990s, influential groups like the American Medical Association (AMA) and Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) had become convinced the U.S. faced an impending “physician oversupply.” In March 1997, just months before the BBA’s passage, a consortium of medical organizations, including the AMA, went so far as to recommend reducing the number of residency positions by 25% (from ~25,000 slots down to 19,000) to stave off a surplus [4]. “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and others warned at the time.
(Not sure how I feel about the ideas the editorial poses about using ML in a supervisory capacity for residents, though...)
Nursing is a hardcore meat grinder, with companies worse than Uber taking advantage of nurses with algorithmic pricing scams, including credit checks to lowball.
Honestly they both seem miserable for similar reasons. When a big selling point of a job is “oh you can get a ton of overtime” I lose interest. I don’t care how much money you’re paying me, it comes out to less when you consider hours worked.
Interestingly, this seems to be the only reason a lot of jobs are considered “high paying”.
There are lot of assumptions in that statement which may not be scientifically valid. Even if, the patient's life should not outweigh the medico's own. In a case where a medico choose that, they must choose to risk their life for a patient. The choice over ones life span ought not to rest with one's pay master as it does in American medicine.
I think we should create a masculine-sounding word for "nurse", like "(patient/care) (guardian/maintainer/technician)". Nursing still sounds like breastfeeding (check the etymology!), which I'd reckon sounds offputting to most men.
Neologisms are cringe, but demeaning men is as well.
This is a nice idea but I think practically the shift will come not from instituting gender-affirming nomenclature but rather redefining male biases.
The idea of being involved in an important (and historically female) profession dedicated to compassionate care should be received as honorable by men irrespective of the job title's femininity. I disagree that it's demeaning.
I think what would help a lot would be a strong male nurse as a lead in a medical television drama. We've had strong male nurses in secondary characters, but not as leads or co-leads.
A sexy male nurse should appeal quite strongly to the traditional medical drama audience; it'd let a studio follow the traditional formula but be enough of a change that it's not a rehash.
That's likely what people will still call them, regardless of the neologism. I am not opposed to the neologism, but like most, it will be really hard to agree on a single one so we should continue to use "nurse" and ignore its etymology meanwhile.
I've been calling sports physios "body mechanics" for quite awhile now. A much more appealing term, IMO, and it cuts to the heart of what the job is about.
If there's a shortage, it's because employers need to pay more, same as every other labor "shortage." Nursing is in demand everywhere, and not everyone has what it takes to do their work. If they could be making more money somewhere else, that's where they'll go.
A couple of years ago, I compared my salary to all my friends in the same field, and found they were all making at least 25% more than me. I asked my work for more money, they said no, so I left. Last I heard they can't find anyone who'll work for so little except fresh grads who can't keep up with the heavy workload nor the high quality demanded by the doctors. And several nurses have told me similar stories.
Just pay.
The people running the system are so completely disconnected from the experience of being a nurse that they're destroying the industry from the top down.
Sociopath who views people as just a barrier to their goals? Promotion to CEO, billion dollar bonus. Millions of tax dollars spent to bail you out of trouble.
Empathetic person willing to literally put your body on the line for other? Shit pay, shit hours, one unlucky break away from destitution.
What's even crazier is the majority of Americans seem to like it this way.
Lot of nurse converts soon I think.
On the plus side, men do have an advantage regarding size/strength in terms of being able to help disabled people move. I think this is probably part of why a lot of men become EMTs (similar field/training).
Maybe in California. I don't think that's the case in most states, unless you're doing a ton of overtime. I know someone who makes $130K/year in my state, which is amongst the top paying states. Has over a decade of experience.
NP further swings the math, to include the tuition costs baked in from a cheap in-state school, employer tuition support, and specializing in demand areas like psych.
I'm largely with Mike Rowe on this one... it's been a shame the level that people have not been directed into more vocational fields and the level of skilled labor shortages as a result. Higher education has largely been self-serving, not community serving.
I'm in a skilled trade and see lots of dudes getting their bodies shredded (with no insurance) for $40k a year (in HCOL). Why do that when pushing paperwork or bartending gets you the same money? Yes there certainly are outstanding individuals that can run their own small company and do well, but they probably could do just as well in another field anyway.
As long as the pay stays the same, companies are just gonna gouge harder. You'll be forced to buy worse work for more money since they can't keep good employees on. If you want to actually fix things talk to your GC's and subs heart to heart about paying their guys better
I’d avoid the latter. The last time the maintenance guy was down at my slum, he was talking about how bad his section 8 housing was.
i guess inevitable at the end of the day when everyone just wants a high paying stable job they can build a life off.
The more everyone the better! There are definitely times when it’s nice to have some guys with muscles around when it comes time to transfer a non ambulatory patient to an X-ray or CT table, but the ladies get it done too!
https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/fact-sheets/nursing-wo...
I'm guessing the goal is to get that parity up to 1:1, or something close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI_c1F994gs
When you're short on nurses, trying to invite men isn't DEI.
If we had plenty of qualified nurses, but hospitals made quotas saying that 20% of nurses must be men, that would be DEI.
It's replacing merit (let me sort for "best available nurse" and hire that person) with another attribute (let me sort for "male nurse," then sort for "best available nurse in the male group", and hire that person). If you hire the best available male nurse, you may have passed on the best available nurse. Given the demographics of nursing, seems likely.
Anyway, they're not talking about having a surplus of candidates, so that doesn't apply.
Say a man thinks nursing is for women and not for men. Say an employer wants more nurses irrespective of sex. Is that employer engaging in DEI if they spend more money on male re-education than on recruiting women?
The problem is the "male re-education" and "recruiting women."
They should just have a recruiting budget and a re-education budget. There should be a way to determine the best spend of the money. Maybe one method of generating a nurse is cheaper, or produces a better quality employee. When you try to have the process generate "at least this percentage of [male/brown/etc] people" instead of just generate the most/best candidates, then you have DEI. The process doesn't produce the most, or best quality employees --it works to force an outcome that is unrelated to employee skill or best business practices.
After years of "why are men dropping out of the workforce" articles it seems we finally are seeing some people come to their senses that yes, you do actually still have to "court" men to enter different careers to make it seem like appealing work for them to do
And according to the article, this courting of male nurses has also been going on for many years.
Could be just me, confirmation bias or whatever but around 2010-2020 it felt like you couldn't go two minutes with tripping over a "we need more women in STEM" article but this is the first I feel I'm ever seeing about "we need more male nurses"
And male teachers have always felt fairly plentiful starting around high school levels to me, and going into university. Not in primary school, but people don't seem to trust adult men around children as a rule so that might be why
Was it because you were male or because you were studying math? Many schools struggle to find good math teachers; it's one of the qualifications in perpetual shortage.
I absolutely hate this. It's the same in every field in contact with kids. When I was a youth camp counsellor, a director told me after stuff happened with other counsellors "at least now, I'm sure you are not a predator" (translation here). I know it was a joke, but the place and the way makes are sometimes seen in the field genuinely hit me hard. I remember the sentence and the director face as she said it better than the other counsellors and the overall situation.
There are a lot of good reasons why we want more men in nursing. For personal reasons some patients may respond better to interactions with men. Additionally men being on average larger and stronger then women is an advantage in a society with many overweight and obese people.
I wasn't looking for grants as a woman in compsci either, but I sure heard about those
> There are a lot of good reasons why we want more men in nursing.
I never disputed or questioned that
MDs are nationally organized and have a fixed career path. Nurses are more "you do you" career path and if a news story about shortages doesn't specify licenses assume they're scamming you. There's a big difference in supply/demand curves for a state licensed 3-month CNA vs a NP with 30 years experience. Flooding the CNA supply by lowering standards will not magically make 30 year experienced certified APRNs appear, at least not for another decade or two.
Female coded jobs have very short career lengths. There's a reason there's a shortage, management makes everyone quit. Average nurse career length is only 8 years. Its not as bad as public school teacher but its pretty bad. Everyone knows the RN with 20 years experience makes six figures etc. Mostly because management forced 90% of her peers to quit and she'll all thats left and it takes six figure salary to keep her. The high pay is not exactly a glowing endorsement of working conditions LOL. Most whom enter the field will burn out long before they get high pay or "cool jobs".
I would comment that everyone knows their field of expertise is mostly inaccurately described in mass media, but surely every other field is accurately represented. This situation unfortunately applies to all areas of expertise including nursing. Articles like this annoy nurses much like mass media portrays of "computers" and "computer people" annoy us with their inaccuracies.
In the 1990s the AMA lobbied congress to get the number of Medicare-funded slots limited. This was done in response to a projected "oversupply" of doctors (preventing a deflationary effect on doctors' compensation). That limit has stuck and now, even though the AMA is lobbying for the removal of the limit, the damage to the supply of doctors has been done and it's a process with a long pipeline.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12256077/
> This editorial argues that the long-standing cap on residency slots, originating with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, is the key structural constraint throttling the U.S. physician workforce.
> In the 1990s, influential groups like the American Medical Association (AMA) and Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) had become convinced the U.S. faced an impending “physician oversupply.” In March 1997, just months before the BBA’s passage, a consortium of medical organizations, including the AMA, went so far as to recommend reducing the number of residency positions by 25% (from ~25,000 slots down to 19,000) to stave off a surplus [4]. “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and others warned at the time.
(Not sure how I feel about the ideas the editorial poses about using ML in a supervisory capacity for residents, though...)
And we all pay the bill for the shortage.
Nursing is a hardcore meat grinder, with companies worse than Uber taking advantage of nurses with algorithmic pricing scams, including credit checks to lowball.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/21/healthcare-n...
And the real money at all is in RN. There's a reason the LPN is known as "low paid nurse".
I'd rather head into the trades than nursing.
Honestly they both seem miserable for similar reasons. When a big selling point of a job is “oh you can get a ton of overtime” I lose interest. I don’t care how much money you’re paying me, it comes out to less when you consider hours worked.
Interestingly, this seems to be the only reason a lot of jobs are considered “high paying”.
When people refer to nurses, they mean RN's, typically.
And yes, don't become an LPN or anything less than an RN.
Sorry, but if you want to take care of patients, you don't get to risk their lives unnecesssarily by refusing a flu shot.
Uh huh.
> Even if, the patient's life should not outweigh the medico's own.
Their desire not to get a minor vaccination should not outweigh the survival of the person under their care.
Neologisms are cringe, but demeaning men is as well.
The idea of being involved in an important (and historically female) profession dedicated to compassionate care should be received as honorable by men irrespective of the job title's femininity. I disagree that it's demeaning.
A sexy male nurse should appeal quite strongly to the traditional medical drama audience; it'd let a studio follow the traditional formula but be enough of a change that it's not a rehash.