Women dominate nursing field, but men dominate salary
Murray State University seniors Gavin Nall and Skyler Frye both share the same passion to become a nurse.
Their parents have had long-standing careers in the medical field: for Nall, his father and Frye, her mother. They’re on the same track, with good grades and both will graduate this year.
While these two are equal in education and skills, one thing sets them apart: their gender.
Males in Nursing
Nursing has always been a female-dominated field, but today more males are entering the workforce. According to the American Assembly for Men in Nursing, 11 percent of all registered nurses are men. That’s a number that’s nearly tripled since 1970, when men made up a mere 2.7 percent.
This number is also on the rise at Murray State University. Dr. Dana Manley, associate professor in the nursing department, said men make up 33 percent of the December 2015 graduating nursing class.
Nall, a senior from Paducah, Kentucky, has noticed this growth in his classes. “We have 11 [male] students in my class alone,” he said. “I think that’s a record for Murray State.”
It’s a record number that shows no signs of slowing down. The American Assembly for Men in Nursing aims for a 20 percent increase by the year 2020.
Salary Inequality
When Nall and Frye enter the nursing field upon commencement, the pair can find a shocking difference just by looking at their pay stubs.
Although female nurses still overwhelmingly dominate the profession, males dominate in salary.
Many occupations have seen the salary gap narrow since the Equal Pay Act 50 years ago. However, the March issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association brought this concern to the forefront, finding that inequality continues to exist in medicine and nursing.
The research team, which included experts at the Yale School of Public Health and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, gathered their information from two surveys.
From 1988 to 2008, they used data from the last six quadrennial National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses. The report states that this mail, electronic and web survey selected a state-based probability sample of currently licensed RNs from data provided by state boards of nursing with a sample size of more than 30,000 RNs per year and a response rate of approximately 60 percent.
The team also relied on Census data for information on earnings.
In the 20 years studied, the salary gap never narrowed.
Female nurses working full time, year-round earn 93 cents for every dollar men earn as RNs. Women earn even less as nurse practitioners, making 87 cents for every dollar a man earns.
As shown in the graph above, the gap varied across specialties.
The biggest gap appears for nurse anesthetists, like the area Nall is planning to pursue, with men earning a whopping $17,290 more than their female coworkers. In a 2013 report by the American Community Survey, 41 percent of anesthetists are men.
Over the course of a 30-year career, female RNs like Frye will have earned about $155,000 less than male RNs using the adjusted earnings gap, $300,000 less using the unadjusted gap.
Frye, a senior from Hodgenville, Kentucky, became frustrated when learning the pay discrepancy and doesn’t find it to be fair. “We work the same long hours, put ourselves in the same dangers of patient violence and diseases, and have some of the same stressors,” she said.
The authors for the JAMA study write, “A salary gap by gender is especially important in nursing because this profession is the largest in health care and is predominantly female, affecting approximately 2.5 million women. These results may motivate nurse employers, including physicians, to examine their pay structures and act to eliminate inequities.”
Why the difference?
The data doesn’t suggest why men earn more, according to Ulrike Muench, an assistant professor of nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study’s lead author.
However, a few ideas linger as to why female nurses are underpaid.
Diana Mason, a professor of nursing at Hunter College of The City University of New York and former editor of The American Journal of Nursing told the New York Times, “A workplace may offer a bit more to the men in order to diversify.” Mason adds that it is possible that women earn less because of a “lingering bias that a man is more of an expert because he’s a man.”
Frye offers her own assumption based on personal experience.
“Men are sometimes more aggressive with negotiation,” she said. “I know I would not be assertive enough to ask for a higher rate starting out, but some men may.”
Muench echoes Frye’s assumption in the study. She adds, “Women more often leave the force to raise children, making it tougher to get promoted.”
Peter McMenamin, a health economist at the American Nurses Association, told NPR this gap is not as big of a problem as the study suggests.
Since more women were sampled than men, the numbers for females “are much more precise,” he said. “We would like any differentials in pay to be based on skills and experience and not on gender.”
While wage gap persists in nursing jobs, it remains smaller than the gap for all professions of 78 cents for women to every dollar earned by men.
For Frye, this discrepancy does not sway her passion to enter the field.
“You always hear about men being paid more even though women have equal positions,” Frye said. “Pay is not why I became a nurse.”