Amid nurse shortage, a university rolls out the welcome mat for men
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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.
Not at all. Caring has traditionally been woman pursuits. And you can underpay cause they care.
There's a ton of academic studies under the terms of "emotional labor". Retail is emotional labor. Nursing. Education, childcare, health care, social work, hospitality, media, advocacy, aviation.
And those jobs pay trash precisely because people (read: women) care. So they're exploitable.
The jobs that you exploit others and forced not to care pay the most.
The capitalists set the system up. Capitalism exploits by its nature. So finding people who are more easily exploitable makes a great deal of capitalist sense. That's how and why this shit was set up.
No, really, I mean it.
For decades, the healthcare complex has been exploiting these workers to our detriment.
The supply of workers is really high, typically, as there is this nobility to the professions. You are a 'helper', you are 'doing something with your life', you have a 'calling'. That extra feel-feels accounted for a lot of extra people in the workforce and that depressed wages as it increased supply. The actual work itself suffered too, as we all had to deal with burnt out healthcare workers with too many bills and not enough dollars. Even a pandemic barely hurt he business model (as far as I can tell from a quick googling).
But if workers start caring about the money more, then the wages will rise (hopefully), and that will attract better workers and not ones near the near of their ropes financially. We all will be better off. I think this goes for teachers too.
It's sort of like IT and engineering, that was exclusively male at one point. Not because women were excluded but because computers were things for geeks and dorks and completely uncool to be associated with.
(Technically that's not 100% true, we did have one female student on display in a glass case at the entrance to the School of Engineering).
Lot of nurse converts soon I think.
I think what is most relevant to me these days:
- When I explain to my family, peers, and the endstate about what I did with my time during working years, I'd like to be able to answer it in a certain way. I stopped being able to answer it in that way by staying in tech, I realized.
- Things over the "months to years" cycle look bad-bad. Shorthand described as I lived through 2008, AI on a timeline looks a heck of a lot like that, and I'd take a morale toll if that's the only toll I end up paying from 2026-2035.
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).
i guess inevitable at the end of the day when everyone just wants a high paying stable job they can build a life off.
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
My point is that for every 1 successful electrician and 1 plumber on a job, there's a handful of guys at the concrete plant. There's 3-5 guys on the roof laying shingle and getting cooked in the sun. There's usually a team of 3-5 guys hanging sheet-rock. A lot of trade work absolutely does suck for the money that's offered. In some situations the money is really good, but the work is even more extreme (oil rigs, heli work, crane ops, etc)
If the plan is "be smart, learn, get skilled and successful" and it works, I am sincerely happy for those guys. I know more of the guys it didn't work for though, there's a lot of them.
But using your own example, how many people with bachelor's degrees are asking if "you want fries with that?" Not every, or any path is guaranteed success... I've worked with plenty of degreed programmers who aren't able to function at all.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
The reason that you didn’t hear about them was that you weren’t looking in that area.
The purpose of advertising is to reach people who aren't looking at a specific area.
I'm guessing the goal is to get that parity up to 1:1, or something close.
https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/fact-sheets/nursing-wo...
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.
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.
When people refer to nurses, they mean RN's, typically.
And yes, don't become an LPN or anything less than an RN.
> 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.
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.
why don't hospitals fund residencies themselves? from what i hear, residents are poorly paid (they make less than nurses) and work long hours (almost like they "reside" in the hospital). i bet they even make money to the hospital.
what's more, when you look at what people pay for healthcare in the USA, money to train residents is peanuts. it'd even make economic sense for people themselves to pool money together and fund residents which would then take care of them as an "alternative" to insurance.
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.