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Since the days of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, the profession has been seen as women's work. But as male-dominated industries like manufacturing decline, nursing has emerged as a stable career choice for all. NPR's Andrea Hsu reports.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: When Hatim Nasser went off to college at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, his family wanted him to study computer science. He decided to give it a shot.
HATIM NASSER: OK. I'll try it. I absolutely hated it.
HSU: He thought about switching to physical therapy.
NASSER: I knew I was, like, more, like, hands-on. I wanted to help people.
HSU: And then one of his friends said he wanted to become a doctor. Nasser ruled that out pretty quickly, thinking about how long it would take.
NASSER: Like, how many years I have to go to school, stuff like that. I was like, I don't want to waste my life doing that much school.
HSU: But nursing? Now, that sounded promising. Jobs are plentiful, and they pay well. The national median wage for registered nurses tops $90,000 a year. Most of all, Nasser says, the work appealed to him.
NASSER: Just being very caring and, like, advocating the best that's possible for a patient 'cause that's when they're at their lowest.
HSU: Now, nursing is an overwhelmingly female occupation, due to stereotypes that nursing isn't manly or that men lack qualities like compassion and patience. Across the country, only about 1 in 8 nurses are men. But their share has risen slowly, thanks to ongoing efforts by schools like this one. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, about 1 in 6 nursing students are men. Professor Curry Bordelon, who's also president-elect of the American Association for Men in Nursing, has worked his whole career to set a new narrative around nursing.
CURRY BORDELON: It's a profession. It's open to all, and it's a long-term career opportunity.
HSU: A job in nursing, he says, can provide stability and predictability, qualities that are hard to come by these days. It's what drew Chris Jones in. He grew up in a small town south of Birmingham and was the first in his family to go to college.
CHRIS JONES: Part of the reason that I became a nurse is I just wanted to ensure that I was going to be able to take care of myself and if I wanted to start a family one day, too, that I could do that as well.
HSU: Jones grew up around a lot of nurses, but he says nursing isn't generally marketed to men as an option. It's not a conversation boys have when they're young.
JONES: They're not shown that it's an opportunity to them. At the career fairs, if nursing's going to be represented, it's usually probably going to be a female.
HSU: Now he's happy to represent. He got his baccalaureate degree in nursing three years ago. He then worked in the cardiothoracic ICU and rose to become an assistant nurse manager. Now he's working toward a master's in nursing and an MBA here at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
JONES: UAB pays for you to go back to school. It's free.
HSU: Ethan Stinson also chose nursing his freshman year of college because of the job security. His aunt's a nurse, so he says no one in his family questioned the choice.
ETHAN STINSON: I'm sure my family's just glad I'm in college still and not doing something else.
HSU: This last semester, he's been doing a preceptorship - kind of like a specialized internship in a hospital psych unit.
STINSON: So it's more of a kind of dangerous unit physically. And I feel like me working some of the more dangerous patients, they kind of calm down just from me being there.
HSU: He graduates next month and already has a job lined up in that same unit.
STINSON: I feel like it's really easy to get a psych job if you're a nurse. They're really hunting people all the time.
HSU: Hatim Nasser, the guy who started out in computer science? Well, he's also about to graduate. He's accepted a job in the heart and lung transplant ICU. He says it's great being in demand.
NASSER: I know, like, engineers-wise, like, I have a brother that - it takes a little longer for them to find a job. So we're grateful for it.
HSU: And their families are grateful, too,
Andrea Hsu, NPR News, Birmingham.
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