https://www.healthline.com/health-news/male-nurses-are-on-the-rise-filling-a-need-and-making-a-living-042215]]
“Previously, decades of legal barriers kept men out of the field, and nursing schools often refused to admit men,” author Liana Christin Landivar wrote in the 2013 American Community Survey highlight report for men in nursing occupations.
The nursing school exclusion was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case brought against a state-supported school in 1981.
Kind of explains the situation where there used to be only about 2.5% male nurses. Nursing is around 10% male now, with ~15% of nursing students being male. I'm going to make a prediction now that nursing could quite easily become seen as a "male profession" some time in the future:
- high median salary of $66k would attract men to the degree that high wages attract men to a field
- men who go into nursing are earning more than the women, probably because they're a more selective cohort, but that further incentivizes other men to enter
- great job security, fulfills the masculine idea of being a "provider" better.
- nursing not seen as such an "academic" field as medicine. With girls not encouraged to do nursing these days, there could one day be less stigma for a man than a woman to enter this field (A smart girl might be told she "wasted her life" by doing nursing rather than becoming a doctor).
- rewards workaholism (and men gravitate to jobs with long hours more than women do)
- lower fatality rate than being a police officer or something
- is a job that rewards physical strength (dealing with unruly patients or helping to move obese patients)
- everyone basically agrees that "females are naturally more nurturing therefore make better nurses" is claptrap
So, yeah, at the heart of it I can't see any specifically "female" traits that are more useful in nursing, but being bigger and more muscly and willing to do long hours is definitely a plus.