The share of men in the strained U.S. nursing corps has ticked up in recent years. Here’s why the pandemic could fuel a further increase.
Jonathan Caesar always thought he would follow in his brother’s footsteps by pursuing a career as an attorney in Las Vegas. But he began to have a change of heart a few years ago, when he started to develop a greater interest in human anatomy while training in mixed martial arts.
“We have [auto] mechanics, and you can put so much work into cars,” Caesar says. “Why wouldn’t you want to know the inner workings of the body and take care of the most important vessel on earth?”
As a male looking to enter the nursing profession, Caesar is an outlier, but he’s not alone: Now in his third year as a student at Arizona College of Nursing’s Las Vegas campus, Caesar says he’s noticed more men in the student body at his school than there were when he began, with the number in his own cohort growing from just himself and two others initially to now six or seven.
That type of uptick bodes well for a profession that is overwhelmingly made up of women, yet has seen a slowly rising share of men in its ranks over the past decade. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates just 8.9% of the country’s 2.7 million registered nurses in 2011 were male. By 2015, men accounted for 10.6% of a workforce approximately 3 million strong.
Last year, the data indicates, 13% of the country’s 3.2 million registered nurses were male.
By Steven Ross Johnson | US News
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