Nursing: Gender and Patient Satisfaction - Essay Sample

Introduction

Over the years, the nursing profession has associated mainly with the female gender. The job has risen from that of care provision to an acknowledged occupation with more dignified duties. Study indicates that women are the majority in the nursing profession than men. The subject of gender needs scrutinization. Studies differ on patient's care by a specific gender, indicating that satisfaction of patients does not rely on the gender of the nurse but rather their services. Women around the nation are diverging into other medical careers that, in the eyes of the world are deemed as a man's cup of tea.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Nursing historically started between the fourth and fifth centuries. At that time, the nursing profession was only for the male gender for a large part of man's history. In Middle Ages responsibility of curing and taking care of the wounded was for military orders and religious deities. In the USA, before the Civil war, the duties of the sick were for slaves. These duties consisted of both males and females. After the war came to a halt, women formed an interest in medicine and nursing.

Nursing in the USA changed from being male-dominated to the female field at a time of the formation of the Army Nurse Corps, which ushered in the 19th century. The First World War in Europe acted as the force behind women's interest in the nursing field. Nursing became a female male field. Red Cross, which was a women's liberation uprising, is considered as one of the major forces in the growth of both scientific and professional development in the nursing fraternity. Health care is a woman's activity, which is why women nurses get mostly stuffed within organizations than men.

There are two types of care; physical, which incorporates hygiene and mobilization and emotional care. Study proves that male nurses are more comfortable in giving physical care, whereas women are more into loving care. An increase in image stereotypes is majorly due to an increment in the feminization of the nursing profession. Studies conducted point at the aftermath of women dominating the nursing profession. We should not look upon the effects men will incur but instead strive to find out how the already existent men working in an environment hugely women dominated cope and adapt.

In Spain, the nursing profession has always gets swayed by the division in gender roles. In fact, up to date, social perceptions echo to the care of a female nurse in Spain. Many vie the nursing career as a female-oriented one. Fiske (2018) model on gender stereotypes explains the traits related to nursing. The essence to sieve between feminine and masculine duties get termed as a usual psychological process (Donnelly, 2017). Fiske (2018) further points to the tendency of people placing groups into categories based on gender stereotypes.

Even though women are dominant in nursing professions, men are getting better posts considering that they are the minority. Women nurses, on the other hand, manifest higher stress levels as a result of dealing more emotionally with their patients as compared to men. Women nurses also exhibit a depreciation on their work with factors such as fewer recognitions from male workers and doctors, lack of balance between their household and work schedules, and conflicts between them and their colleagues. Education and institutions have, in years, put in place measure as an obstacle to men's access to nursing courses due to most women's refusal of their care.

Moreover, most specialized health centers and prenatal care units have the lowest number of male nurses significantly. Male nurses get excluded when it comes to informal hiring processes. Male nurses get viewed as just muscles by female nurses who consider them as individuals just hired to move around things or people. Male nurses have hence formulated a defense strategy by employing a female nurse when dealing with a patient or using humor.

Women in recent research have gotten stated to take up lateral moves in their careers as men take linear. Female nurses are said to spend most of their time in their job before they even think of training for other courses, which is referred to as the certificate gathered syndrome. Men, on the other hand, take up their careers at the same time considering other options. Findings indicate that a minority of males in nursing is brought about by the market of structural labor, which tends to be in favor of men more than women.

Children's career breaks are one of the most commonly stated reasons as to the decreased population of men in the nursing field. The children's career break is the period taken by both genders to acquire a distinct status in nursing. In the USA and Canada, the labor market gets distinguished by unchartered personnel, and unskilled individual's payments are significantly low. In the USA, nursing as a field gets termed as for the less skilled. Hence we find that a vast population of men find it difficult to advance in nursing than women.

Several stereotypes need to get addressed, such as most men branding the traits of caring and submission to women. Moreover, some men fear to join nursing with the fear that they will get branded as less manly. In most societies, men are viewed as loud and aggressive, making it impossible for some men to even consider the nursing field with the fear of the eyes of the community. Study shows that 94% of the nurses in the USA and Canada are women. The dominance in this field by women is more so because of the society's beliefs that nursing is a woman's profession.

These perception has not helped in driving men to the nursing profession. Another opinion that has seen men's numbers decreased in the nursing profession is that nurses get poorly paid (Ilostat, 2015), making the career a less attractive one for men. Nursing relationships and women are one that gets termed as women-oriented such that individual professionals relate to the medical sector with the male gender and nursing sector to females. Studies indicate to feminize careers to having less power and also in economic terms have not gotten valued positively. Patriarchal culture's perceptions have affected patients as well as nurses lowered self-esteem.

The stereotype has also affected men who want to undertake the nursing profession. The background above, changes to gender equality that have formed in recent years, has proved to alter the perceptions of most in pursuing nursing positively. The study has shown that more men have developed the desire for the nursing profession more so in Spain and other western communities. Lithuania medical professions get faced with adequate self-reliance for a period of fifty years from the year 1940- 1990. Since attaining its political and economic freedom independence, the state has been on the rise to revolutionize the health care sector.

Lithuania is a forefront state that has most of its physicians as female. Research conducted on such a feminized gender professional to determine the view on a good physician male or female gender-based brought back mixed results. However, recent findings indicate that the know-how and the ethos of a professional get marked by gender and are neutral (Hall, 2017). To shed more light on professional traits expected and the gender dynamics in the field of medicine have to be tackled. In medicine, gender-specific tasks mechanisms are casting and inclusion.

The gender in a profession does not really count as long as the knowledge acquired in the teaching institutions adds and affirms their values. We should not only strive to instill skills in practitioners but rather add value. Practitioners should not only possess the skills but rather maximize those skills by employing them appropriately (Park, 2017). Students and doctors should be encouraged to fathom the essence of achieving the same goals but using varying methods. Therefore practitioners must acquire the necessary skills and learn how to deploy them.

A significant part of the debate is on how far education ought to get carried upon the notion of instilling knowledge as part of an activity that incorporates well with the changes in behaviors or the state of minds of the students. Intersectionality embraces gender and identity production. Intersectionality is both a theory and a method that significantly centers on the interaction of genders. Intersectionality gets determined by social groups such as race, religion, and gender that gets joined to individuals or groups, bringing about a gap that hence creates a system based on discrimination and disadvantages (English Oxford Living Dictionary, 2020).

Men in the nursing profession get viewed as an outcast. It is to most people believe that men particularly do not belong to a dominant feminine job. The topic of gender marginalization in nursing is the same as compared to all professions. The difference comes that men are the minority in a woman-dominated field. Women have undertaken a surgeon who at first proved a huge ask from the eyes of the nation where they were deemed incapable. The nation's expectation from the ladies was to incorporate masculine traits in the surgeon fraternity.

A study has shown that for a woman to be successful in the surgical field, they must be innovative in understanding the needs of being a surgeon, or they must pen out a new space for themselves. In most learning institutions, the number of women taking up postgraduate surgical courses has increased, with the percentage in the UK being 58%. As women begin progression in the medical field, professional identities get formed within them, which is in correlation to the surgical area. Despite states doing away with legal walls to women's advancement in surgical careers, women continue to have low figures in the so-called male domains (Craven, 2016)

This problem has continued as there is less or no discussions on feminine inclusivity in male domains where identities are mostly masculine oriented. The hardships women undergo in undertaking surgical professions are highlighted in a study carried out where some women got told to have gotten marked out due to their gender. Most women in this field get expected to have male masculinity. If we look into the narrative part, most individuals are deemed to self-author their identity employing self-drawing on the norms, values, and language.

The concept of self-authoring brings about a sense of agency and an opportunity for self-determination. Individuals with this identity possess the power to affect change around social worlds. Identity may well get termed as a procedure of becoming and regularly shaping and being brought into shape by the universe: figured world's theory, terms gender as an entity of identification which correlates to post-structuralism feminism. Culture and the ways of identification are dominant from this perspective. Interaction between identity and society is essential.

References

Park, J. (2017). Gender Differences in Nurse Practitioner Salaries.. Journal of American Association of Nurse Practioners, (). http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2327-6924.12512

Donnelly K., (2017). Masculine and feminine traits on the bem sex-role inventory, 1993 - 2012: a cross-temporal meta-analysis. Sex Roles 76 556-565. 10.1007/s11199-016-0625-y

Fiske S. T. (2018). Stereotype content: warmth and competence endure. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 27 67-73. 10.1177/0963721417738825

ILOSTAT (2015). Key Indicators of the Labor Market. Available at: http://www.ilo.org/ilostat/

Intersectionality. (2020).In English Oxford Living Dictionary. Retrieved from https://en. Englishoxfordlivingdictionaries.com/definition/intersectionality

Craven, H. (Ed.). (2016). Core Curriculum for Medical-Surgical Nursing. (5th ed.). Pitman, NJ: Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses.

Hall, A.M. (2017). Fundamentals of Nursin...