Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I'm just going to throw this out here: only about 10% of nurses are male. Yet I rarely hear about the cultural problem of not having enough males in nursing, or how we can encourage more male nurses.

Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it.

Definitely it is well known that there is a shortage of men in nursing as well as in clinical psychology for example, and many in those industries think their industries would be better off with more men, and make efforts to change things. Some random links:

https://asunews.asu.edu/20121130_meninnursing

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/health/22therapists.html?p...

I have a background in psychology, so I know less about the nursing situation, but in psychology it's definitely a topic that comes up. Which is not surprising, the gender disparity is very large: When I was an undergrad, I was in a small minority, somewhere in 10-20%, and it can be an odd feeling.

Perhaps because you mostly read tech news sites, and not nursing news sites. This stuff (in both tech and nursing) rarely reaches the mainstream news sources, so people not involved in the industry generally are unaware of it.

That's a good point.

However, I was watching something on TV just yesterday about getting women into programming. My perception is that trying to get more women into programming is a much more popular issue than getting men into nursing.

If we kept up with industry news would we observe more "get women to be garbage collectors" and "get men into preschool education" news?

One thing to realize here is that the industries are not symmetrical. There are billionaires and billion-dollar companies in the tech industry (as well as many many non-rich but still very well off engineers that can each donate money), but nothing like that in nursing or psychology or garbage collection or preschool education.

So the tech industry, if it want to, can pour large sums of money into its causes (as we see in the topic of this discussion, but also many others). And it can make sure the mainstream press notices them. Whereas even if the psychology community wants desperately to get more men to join its ranks, it just doesn't have the resources the tech industry has.

It also is not just money. The tech industry is the industry that makes websites, that builds twitter and facebook and all that. Initiatives in the tech industry have an inherent advantage over initiatives in other industries, which have to make the effort to find some tech person to build their online presence.

So it is not surprising to me at all that initiatives in the tech industry are more noticeable than from other industries. The tech industry is special in many ways.

Edit: An example of an industry with even more power and noticeability than tech is hollywood, which has both money and famous+popular people in it. That's why we hear about all the various initiatives this or that actor is up to.

> However, I was watching something on TV just yesterday about getting women into programming. My perception is that trying to get more women into programming is a much more popular issue than getting men into nursing.

Sure, you see it on TV more because it better fits a canned mass media narrative about the progress of women into male-dominated, well-paid, percieved-as-high-status professions. That doesn't mean its considered more of a focus in the relevant professions.

Its a mistake to assume that the frequency and intensity with which something appears in the mass media is somehow a reliable guide to anything about its significance outside mass media.

> If we kept up with industry news would we observe more "get women to be garbage collectors" and "get men into preschool education" news?

Garbage collectors I'm less sure of, but, yes, getting more men into most all levels of secondary-and-earlier education is a not-insignificant issue.

Have you ever heard the phrase "one thing is not like the other?" I think that might apply here.

Psychology is still very male-dominated, at least in terms of employers, teachers, and researchers — i.e. people in power in the industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com