‘The more diverse nursing is, the stronger it gets’

Nursing has been stereotypically defined as a profession for women. Male nurses only began to move out of the military and into mainstream nursing after the Second World War ended, and growth since then has been slow.

According to figures from the Nursing & Midwifery Council, only 11.5 per cent of all registered nurses in the UK in 2016/17 were male, up just half a percent on the previous year. Ratios vary depending on specialism: mental health nursing attracts around equal numbers of men and women, while in contrast there were just 103 male midwives registered in 2015, compared with more than 31,000 women.

Amongst students in 2016, 2,800 men were accepted onto nursing courses compared with 26,000 women according to data from UCAS. One such student is James Marlow, in his second year of a mental health nursing degree at UWE Bristol. After spending a decade working in advertising, he got into care work as a complete break from his former career.

Trainee mental health nurse James Marlow studies at UWE

“It was a lightbulb moment for me,” James says. “I was working with young lads with autism and challenging behaviour, about maybe it was something to do with having young children at the time but it really clicked for me. If you’d said to me when I was younger, ‘do you want to work in a specialist unit, or go into homes and care for people with mental health difficulties?’ I’d have laughed at you.

“I think it goes back to why more men don’t go into nursing – it relates back to gendered jobs. It doesn’t seem ‘macho’ and there’s a bit of belittling behaviour around it.”

UWE have made getting more men into nursing a priority for their department

Andrew Christaki, a senior Royal College of Nursing officer in the South West region, has been a nurse for almost three decades and says the gender disparity has always been high. “People don’t apply,” he says. “Why that is could be a number of reasons; it may well be the career structure, and maybe the pay. I haven’t seen a lot of difference in the figures in the last 20-30 years. Nursing has always been predominantly female.

“Do I see more male becoming interested in the nursing career? No, not really. I don’t see anything on the horizon that will change or make any difference to what it is happening now. However, I do think we need more male nurses in the profession, and career opportunities and career development within the health profession is phenomenal. It is a good career.”

Certain areas of nursing are still dominated by women

For James, it’s vitally important to get more men into nursing, and something that UWE Bristol is making a high priority: the Departments of Midwifery and Nursing hold the Athena SWAN Charter in recognition of their support of gender equality, with numbers of male students slightly higher than the national average across the departments.

“The whole idea of nursing is working with people, and they all have individual needs and wants,” says James. “The way I might work with someone is completely different to how someone else would do it. People need different approaches – that’s what we’re constantly taught, about person-centred care.

“The more diverse nursing is, the stronger it gets. You need a wide selection of people working in the sector because you are dealing with wide selection of people. If someone said, “let’s not attract any more nurses from BAME backgrounds, that wouldn’t even be a consideration. The lack of men in nursing should be challenged or nothing will change.”