Anyone who works in medicine knows that nurses are not to be messed with. They’re the ones running hospitals like well-oiled machines, and their role is every bit as vital as any doctor’s. Yet somehow, a surprising number of people still see them as less than.
That’s exactly what one woman found herself dealing with when her stepmom couldn’t stop mocking her boyfriend’s nursing career, calling it feminine and unmanly. She loved her stepmom deeply, but the jokes just kept coming. Unsure how to put a stop to it without damaging their relationship, she turned to Reddit for advice.
While the woman works as a doctor, her boyfriend has built his career in nursing
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That didn’t sit well with her stepmom, who took every chance she could to mock him for it, calling his job feminine and unmanly
Image credits: freepik (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Lance Reis / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
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Image credits: mybfisanurse
Nursing comes with a lot of harmful stereotypes, and misogyny is at the core of it
The man in this story is by far not the only one who experiences this kind of stereotyping. Nursing has long been a profession plagued by misconceptions, and at the root of most of them is the same thing: it is seen as women’s work. That perception has fueled a lot of misogyny toward the field, and male nurses end up caught in the crossfire too.
As a result of sexism, when a profession becomes associated with women, it tends to get devalued. Nursing is a textbook example of that. According to Regis College, one of the most common assumptions is that nursing is inherently a feminine job, built on the myth that women are naturally more caring and compassionate. That belief alone has done a lot to define how the entire profession is seen.
From there, other stereotypes follow. Nurses are widely viewed as subordinate to doctors, as if their entire role is to assist rather than lead and make critical decisions of their own. Regis College notes that this kind of thinking relies on a harmful hierarchy that treats some contributors as less valuable than others. Doctors and nurses intentionally pursue different career paths, and the idea that one outranks the other says more about how society values certain kinds of work than it does about the actual roles themselves.
Nursing is also frequently dismissed as a low-skill job, despite the years of education, clinical training, and licensing that registered nurses must complete before they can even begin working. Many go on to become nurse practitioners or pursue doctoral-level programs with serious leadership responsibilities.
The assumption that it requires little skill is hard to separate from the fact that it has long been seen as women’s work, and women’s work has historically been underestimated.
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To understand where these stereotypes come from, you have to look at how nursing became a female dominated field
These assumptions did not appear out of nowhere. They are tied to a specific history that explains how nursing ended up being seen as a female profession in the first place.
As Alice Blackmore, MN, RN, explains, it was not always this way. In the 1700s, when the first hospitals opened in the United States, many nurses, often called stewards, were actually men. That started to change in the 1860s during the Civil War, when male nurses left to fight and women stepped in to fill the overwhelming need for caregivers.
By 1900, women made up roughly 91% of the nursing workforce. Institutional policies then cemented that further. When the U.S. Army Nurse Corps reorganized in 1901, men were banned from serving, a restriction that lasted until 1955.
Many civilian nursing schools also refused to admit male students, and it was not until a 1981 court ruling that nursing programs were legally required to accept men.
While times have changed, the stereotypes that formed over centuries did not simply disappear. Society inherited the idea that nurses, who are mostly women, are supposed to be gentle, nurturing, and obedient. And even as more men have entered the field, it remains a predominantly female profession.
Sadly, society has a long history of dismissing anything associated with women as lesser. That is exactly what this man’s stepmom was doing, whether she realized it or not.
The author shared more details about the situation in the comments
From there, readers chimed in with advice on how to best approach the stepmom
The woman later came back with an update, revealing exactly how the conversation played out
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Image credits: mybfisanurse
Readers thought the stepmom’s reasoning was strange, but were ultimately happy with how it all ended
