
Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree - imartin2k
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-want-to-be-nurses-their-wives-agree.html
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tptacek
We should rename the profession. "Nurse" is gendered, but also poorly captures
the responsibilities of the modern nursing profession.

It is batshit crazy that our first line of medical care in the US is medical
doctors. For 80% of what ordinary people see doctors for, Nurse Practitioners
are _superior_ to doctors: they're more available, can spend more time with
patients, and can more easily escalate cases to doctors or specialists than
the patients themselves can.

What would make a lot of sense to me would be to rename "Nurse Practitioners"
to "Associate Doctors".

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solatic
To put it in more tech-industry terms, doctors are either Level 2 (general
practitioners) or Level 3 (specialists) health support. Adding more low-cost
Level 1 health support is a great way to reduce the workloads of L2 and L3 and
thus both reduce costs throughout the system as well as improve outcomes for
most ~customers~ patients.

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0xbear
Except of course no one in this system is interested in reducing costs.

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flukus
The patients, governments and private insurers are all interested in it I
assume. Personally I'm more interested in increasing availability, when I need
a medical certificate for a cold it's a huge pain to try and book a doctor.
And then 99% of my interactions are watching them fill in paperwork and take
my blood pressure, something we already rely on nurses for in hospitals.

I don't know if it will get anywhere though, doctors have a powerful union.

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0xbear
Government is interested in whatever their donors tell them to be interested
in. That's why ACA is a trillion dollar giveaway to healthcare industry
instead of net savings.

ACA also disincentives private insurers from wanting to reduce cost. Their
profit is now limited to a certain percentage of the premiums, so naturally
their only real way to profit is by raising the living shit out of the
premiums.

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flukus
Things weren't heading that way before the ACA and they aren't heading there
anywhere else in the western world.

Whatever problems you have with the ACA, it's not the cause here.

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0xbear
I didn't say it was the cause. The cause is that the congressmen/women will
sell their mom for a buck.

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moomin
Someone with a shallow familiarity with feminism like myself won't find
anything surprising here. That patriarchy (which is a set of commonly held
attitudes) disadvantages men as well as women is well understood. That many
women have patriarchal attitudes is also well understood.

However, don't assume that these things are fixed. Highly feminine occupations
such as film editor and software engineer have long since "flipped" to being
male-dominated professions. Nursing could easily be next.

Or, you know, we could all grow up as a society but I'm seeing no evidence
that this is likely to happen.

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PhilWright
It is well known that men favor working with things and women favor working
with other people. So in a society that provides complete equality you will
find that some professions are dominated by a particular sex. Nursing is
dominated by women because far more women enjoying working closely with people
than men do. That is not going to flip.

The feminist idea that all professions should end up with about 50%
participation if there is true equality is patent nonsense.

~~~
throwawaycopy
Being that we're hairless apes who rely on clothing, fire to break down our
food, and a host of other technologies just for basic survival, I'd say our
natural biology is pretty damned unimportant when it comes to such high level
behavior such as preferred profession in the Western world.

Your culture and your language are by far much more responsible for your
desires and actions. Just look how easily mankind is swayed by mere words to
go to war!

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ableton
I have thought about this a lot, and yet when you observe little kids, little
boys want to play with trucks and cars, and little girls like playing with
dolls. Nobody has to tell boys to play with cars or toy guns. They just like
them. Obviously everybody's an individual. But by and large I think there are
trends at such a young age it's apparent that the gender differences in
occupational choices aren't just due to culture.

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moomin
Your big assumption here is that kids are ignorant of culture and pay no
attention to non-explicit signals. This is demonstrably and wholly false.

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influx
"In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled
vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on
the matter."

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/22677-girls...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/22677-girls-
dolls-boys-toy-trucks.html)

This suggests there may be something deeper than expectation from culture and
society.

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throwawaycopy
Monkeys don't have language and culture.

This study suggests nothing about the impact of culture and society on human
individuals.

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GhostVII
Isn't that the point? Monkeys don't have language and culture, but males and
females still prefer different types of things, giving evidence to the
argument that it is not simply culture influencing children's toy preferences

~~~
throwawaycopy
This is a study about monkeys. How does this and why should this apply to
humans?

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flukus
Because we both evolved from a distant ancestor, any behavior we share is very
likely to be an evolutionary trait.

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Overtonwindow
Very good article. My dad was a nurse for 25 years, and I remember in his
graduation photo he was the only man with about 30 women.

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JoeAltmaier
I looked for the part about "Their Wives Agree" and didn't find it. What did I
miss?

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throw_away
"Ofer Sharone, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, has studied middle-aged white-collar professionals who
have lost their jobs. He found that some men who might have been willing to
consider lower-paid jobs in typically feminine fields encountered resistance
from their wives, who urged them to keep looking.

“Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,”
Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job
that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with
their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”

~~~
tenpies
This is even more telling when you consider that the husband's employment
status is the best predictor of divorce[1]. I wonder if some jobs result in an
even higher incidence of divorce than unemployment.

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[1]
[http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/au...](http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/aug16asrfeature.pdf)

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stuaxo
Is this just in the US? In the UK I have had male and female nurses all over.

