Gender-based barriers for male students in nursing education programs: prevalence and perceived importance

To meet the recent call to increase the number of nurses by recruiting men, nursing education programs will need to reduce gender-based barriers. No study found has adequately quantified the prevalence and perceived importance of barriers to men in nursing education programs. These barriers create an academic environment that is unfriendly to men. As such, I defined a new construct, "male friendliness," as a function of the presence and importance of these barriers. The aims of this study were to describe the prevalence and perceived importance of barriers and to develop a tool to measure male friendliness in nursing programs. A pilot tool addressing 33 barriers, which were obtained from the literature, my experience, and a panel of nurse educators, was mailed to 200 male nurses. The findings revealed that seven barriers were importantly different in prevalence between different subsamples of male nurses, and no barrier was rated unimportant by more than 20% of respondents. The similarities in findings between groups of male nurses, diverse in geography, school attendance, and graduation dates, suggest that the barriers men face in nursing school are pervasive, consistent, and have changed little over time. From the findings, the Inventory of Male Friendliness in Nursing Programs (IMFNP) was developed.