Reading “About Men” by Gretel Ehrlich this week got me thinking about other professions that are painted as masculine or feminine but do not nearly fit this stereotype. While doing some investigating, I came across nursing as one such profession. In general, healthcare is female-dominated, with nearly 80% of the healthcare workforce being comprised of women, according to the CDC. This is in line with the image attributed to healthcare, which depicts its workers as people who display an empathetic, nurturing, caring nature. This connotation carries over to job postings for healthcare workers. Job listings for female-dominated jobs tend to use feminine language, with common key words of “sympathetic, care, fosters, empathy and families.” These job descriptions appeal to female candidates, who are more likely to view themselves with these traits than male candidates. Yet, this is not the only reality of healthcare jobs. With the nurturing aspects also comes many stereotypically masculine aspects: intense physical labor in dealing with patients, high-stress endurance, rapid decision-making and critical thinking skills under pressure, and emotional compartmentalization skills. If a nurse is now soothingly talking to a patient, they have just dealt with an unexpected outburst in which they had to quickly restrain and calm the patient. If they are acting playful with a pediatric patient, they are trying to distract the kid from the medical emergency that had just happened a few minutes before.
Just as with female-dominated jobs, male-dominated jobs often contain masculine descriptions in their job postings, with key words like “manage, forces, exceptional, proven and superior.” While many male-dominated jobs don’t necessarily fit with the feminine descriptions listed earlier, these masculine descriptions are often a large part of female-dominated jobs as well. Claire Cain Miller, a journalist who frequently considers gender in her works, points out that this could be a reason why “women have historically entered male-dominated professions…more than men have entered female-dominated ones.” This also makes me consider the fact that in society, even as there is more flexibility in definitions of gender in recent times, the masculine option always seems to be preferred. As women have the option to enter traditionally male fields and dress more stereotypically masculine, men have not experienced nearly as substantial of a shift into femininity. A successful women can now be a woman in a male- or female-dominated, but men can only be successful in masculine fields. This stems from the idea that masculinity remains superior. Women reaching into a socially acceptable form of masculinity is seen as improvement, but men going into femininity is stepping down. Obviously, it is not nearly as simple and binary as this, but I hope this leaves you with the desire to consider more about how patriarchal ideas are embedded into modern society.
