Bill Entwistle ’06 walks into his classes every day like any other student. However, he encounters an interesting situation. Bill’s classes are made up of nearly all women. Entwistle is one of Fairfield’s few male nursing majors.
“Every now and then I feel out of place, but for the most part I look at this as an opportunity to meet 62 potential girlfriends,” Entwistle joked.
Although the number of male nurses has nearly tripled in the past two decades, the university has not seen much of an increase in the number of male nursing students in the past few years.
“We do hope to change that,” said Dean of Nursing Dr. Jeanne M. Novotny. “One of my goals in coming to Fairfield is to get 50 percent men in the nursing program.” Novotny said that this is the first step to balancing the gender gap in the profession, which is important for nursing since it is one of the last careers which still has such a huge disproportion of men and women.
According to Prof. Phil Greiner, many male nursing majors choose their major because they have past experience with nurses in their families or experience as EMTs.
“I was an EMT intermediate,” said nursing major Todd Pelletier ’04. “I started in pre-med and got experience in hospitals, but I wanted to be more involved in patient care.”
Greiner had similar feelings when choosing to go into nursing himself. He worked one summer as a nurse’s aid in a geriatric facility, and the next summer as an orderly in a crippled hospital. “I realized that what nurses did was what I wanted to do … be more involved in helping people to get better.”
An article in Nurseweek magazine reported that one reason for the increase in male nurses is the virtually nonexistent job market, and the fact that nurses are always needed despite the economy.
As a minority in a female dominated profession, male nurses face the challenges of stereotypes and discrimination. They are also forced to face the lurking question, “Why not a doctor?” that female nurses are rarely expected to answer.
“People have a tendency to refer to nurses as ‘her,’ and assume that you’re the doctor,” said Pelletier. “Once they get past that, people are very understanding. I haven’t had any problems in hospitals.”
Entwistle agreed that being a minority is not a huge problem. “Gender discrimination actually works in my favor … Hospitals are always looking to add male nurses to their predominately female staff,” he said.
Female nurses are affected by the national trend for more male nurses. Men were paid higher salaries on average, in 2000, than women for the same registered nurse positions.
The median income based on yearly earnings for women was $36,140, while for men it was $37,908.
“Men differ in career trajectory,” Novotny said. She noted that this is one reason for the difference in salaries.
“Women often stop working to have children, and often men have more experience and have done more research.”
Entwistle hopes to get his masters and Ph.D. and get into hospital administration. “I want to be running the show,” he said.
“I see nursing as the health care career of the 21st century,” said Novotny. “There are a lot more options than in medicine.”
Pelletier agreed, “If you go into medicine, you go through eight years of medical school and then are stuck being a doctor in a clinical setting. There are so many more opportunities for nurses.”
“Nursing is a fantastic career for men,” Novotny said. She also said that hospitals are looking for nurses with strong backgrounds in biology, math, physics and chemistry.
“The hard sciences that guys like … [yet] a lot of men haven’t even thought of it as a career option,” Novotny said.
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