There’s a thread that’s made me think of what I’ve heard from several people over the years - namely, that it’s hard to stick with nursing because nurses “eat their young” - in other words, the environment, particularly for young nurses, is very hostile, culturally.
Is this true? Is it true everywhere? Was it always thus? How exactly is it hostile? (Giving the new girls no help, worst shifts, what?) If we really have a nurse shortage, why is it allowed to continue? What would need to happen to stop it?
I also work in a mostly female profession - a few years ago, we didn’t have the twee little word “guybrarian”, because what you called a male librarian was “Mr. Director, sir.” I don’t think librarianship or teaching, other female-dominated professions, have a cultural institution of toxicity. I’ve heard whatever it is that’s going on in nursing blamed on, “you know, all those women!” which is clearly stupid - but I want to know what the excellent nurses we have on this board have to say about it.
I think the toxic female environment hypothesis has a lot of merit. I get along better with females rather than most men but I am convinced that it is because I am male. I work in an obscure branch of IT analysis owned by a mega-corp. The gender breakdown is probably 60 - 40 or more favoring females. My female coworkers are highly paid and trained professionals of all ages yet they fight - fight - fight all the time. My boss who is a 50 something Jewish woman often asks me call some female coworker or see them in person because the female on female bickering has already caused an impenetrable impasse on what needs to be done.
I saw the same thing when I was in graduate school and was the lone male in an otherwise completely male lab. That was an eye opener and not in a good way. Professions that are too highly dominated by one sex or the other are always going to have problems that would be mitigated if the sex gap were narrower.
A friend of mine was a nurse in training in Holland. I noticed that not the co-workers, but the long hours she had to put in for “training” were really unfair. Basically, she had to work long hours in unpopular shifts for years, with minimal training, for very low pay. All because she was " in training" . The working environment just abused nurses in training as cheap slave labour.
My friend got though it, got the license, and then discovered there was less work for trained nurses, because they had to be paid more then the nurses in training. Duh.
Seems affordable health care is built on the slave labour of young women “in training” .
I’m not a nurse. I have one friend who is a nurse. And, I used to married to a person whose profession was to advise hospitals on how to become more efficient through “re-sizing” (a clever euphemism for cut as many employees as you can).
My impression, not as a nurse but just from my experiences with these two persons and other medical professionals, is that so many employee cuts at the hospitals over the years have the nursing staff so overworked that sometimes, running to the restroom is taking the risk of missing an issue with a patient.
This kind of working environment can make anyone pretty cranky, at best. If the younger and newer nurses get some hazing, although not something I would do, I can understand it happening.
Also, some professions have the view that one must “pay their dues” before they deserve the respect of the old-timers. Perhaps nursing also has that view.
I realize I might be hijacking, but I needed to respond to this post. I studied in a science department that was (surprisingly) dominated by females. I have never seen better friends in my life. I was also friends with a large group of people in high school, again mostly females. No back-stabbing, in-fighting, etc. there either.
I think the toxic female environment hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis with no proof. Certainly, you can get women that are difficult to work with and there are probably several factors in determining a group dynamic, but in my experience, women and girls get along just fine with each other, both in social circles and in work environments.
I can believe it can certainly happen given people who are mostly compatible but variations of this topic have come up many times before here and lots of people, especially women, report the same thing. I am about as far from being a misogynist as you can get but I am always cognizant of this phenomenon. I try to use it to my advantage so that when female coworkers start brutalizing and cannabilizing one another, I can step in and help break up the mess and get the work back on track. It gets old seeing coworkers that you like and respect crying at their desks because of these problems.
I have worked professionally at mostly mega-corps so my personal sample size is several hundred female coworkers and bosses that I have known well and saw the same thing over and over. Particularly at the headquarters of one company who you all know, professional female rivalry got so out of hand that me and a few of my other male colleagues were asked to attend various meetings that we had nothing to do with just to moderate the discussions between groups and to prevent physical fights between female managers from breaking out Jerry Springer style. Some people will probably want to call bullshit on that last sentence but I assure you it is true. There was a history of female on female fights including physical ones there because of the way the company was structured. Different business units competed directly with one another and people’s pay and livelihoods depended on outcompeting their own coworkers. That is what you call a mouse in a pit of starving piranhas effect. Anyone can become brutal in those conditions but it tends to set high achieving females off disproportionality.
I supervise a group of nine women and one guy. Normally, everything is fine, but when it comes to any sort of potential benefit being handed out, it’s like working with five year-olds: I found out that they had actually drawn up secret lists working out who had the better shift etc on which day going back several years. It’s like kids fighting over the front seat or the bigger slice of cake. and they get HEATED about it. They will be united trying to get a better deal over another team of workers, then if we get said better deal, they suddenly turn on one another. They get quite affronted when they come to me to plead their case and I tell them I’m not interested.
The guy just does what I ask him.
This is a small sample size, and I present it for what it is.
Guybrarian? You must be joking. We prefer to be called librarymans.
Seriously though, I’ve never heard of female library workers being weird to male librarians. Patrons yes, fellow workers, no.
But I definitely have seen the female toxicity thing many times. Gossip, gossip, gossip, it’s everywhere. It’s true that most don’t do that, but the ones that do are incessant about having their way and destroying anyone that gets in their way.
As a guy librarian, I’ve found the truly gossipy all complain to me, because I’m no threat. So I know who’s pissed at who and why all the time. And someone is ever pissed at me, someone will tell me because they love the gossip. I can then head this potential problem off at the pass before it gets too big.
I’ve been a teacher, worked in a data systems office that was 100% female, and IT company that had a good share of women, an IT dept. in which I was the ONLY woman, and now work in a small office that is now 100% female except for the owner. My observations:
Women and men (see also anything by Deborah Tanner) have different ways of compteting. With women it is often all about cooperation. Yes, compete through cooperation and getting along. One of the worst things a girl or woman can say to other women about one of their own is that she’s stuck-up, bossy, and uncooperative. One of the best things is that she’s helpful, friendly, and so on. All-female teams can be incredibly productive. You don’t often see women boasting about their accomplishments as men are likely to do. You don’t often see women taking credit for others’ work as some men are very quick to do if they can get away with it. This is not to say that guys don’t get into the whole “teamwork” thing – they do, and the team I put together during my IT managerial days was extraordinarily cooperative and productive. It just has to be approached differently.
In teaching, the new teachers always get the worst classes, the overcrowded classes filled with discipline problems, the intro courses that nobody wants to take. The ones that really need and experienced person up front. The veterans get the advanced classes, the ones filled with students who are really interested in the subject and who want to do well in order to go to a prestigious college.
I’ve never worked in the health care field, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the new nurses were more likely to get the night shifts, the difficult tasks that no one else wants. My observations from my own and others’ hospitalizations indicates that nurses must get very, very, tired, and very, very frustrated. They are supposed to be well-educated professionals, and I think most of them know the right things to do, but they are so overburdened that they cannot do it.
Don’t new doctors, male or female, also go through something similar? At least the stories, TV shows and movies seem to suggest that the first couple of years of internship and hospital practice are horrendous.
I’m a student nurse right now. Regarding “eating their young,” several of my faculty have mentioned this in class. I think it has something to do with hazing and something to do with “paying your dues.” And I don’t think it has to do with being female necessarily–think of doctors and med students/residents! Medicine is pretty sex-integrated, but there’s a ton of hazing and crap that goes on at that level.
So maybe it’s healthcare in particular, or maybe it’s just high-stress, short-staffed professions. In clinical situations, there’s been very little reception to my wanting to learn things so far, and I think it’s directly connected to the fast pace and high workload. In fact, another nursing student who is farther along and works as a CNA has been one of the most frustrating people I’ve worked with. I was doing my very first Accu-Chek, and she practically ripped the thing out of my hands because I was trying to figure out the right way to hold it to draw blood. It seems my taking 10 extra seconds to make sure I got it right was too slow for her. It made me feel really stupid in front of the patient, and I got that “eating their young” feeling. But I don’t think it was malicious, I just think people get frustrated when they have to do their job AND teach someone else at the same time.
There’s a huge learning curve in nursing–even after I’m licensed, each job is going to be an entirely new field. So more experienced nurses are going to be holding my hand…just what they don’t want to be doing.
Qadgop, someone else has also mentioned this, and I don’t want to hijack the thread, but isn’t there something similar with doctors? I have quite a few friends who are in med school or residencies right now, and it seems like there’s a culture of hazing the young ones there too. Maybe it stops once school is over–“Real” doctors can respect each other and be colleagues.
One example would be working med students to the bone until they can’t see straight. Despite a lot of talk over continuity of care (and I understand the importance of this from my own studies, don’t get me wrong), it seems like the positive effects might be canceled out by the negative. Namely, doctors who are so tired and overworked that they can’t see straight. I’m not trying to level a heavy criticism, I’m just looking for some opinions. It feels, to most of my friends in the field, like a “we walked uphill both ways and LIKED IT” message from the older crowd. Is that an example of doctors eating their young, or am I misunderstanding?
Yes, doctors have that “I had it tougher than you when I was a student/resident”, but frankly that attitude tends to pass once training is done and everyone is an attending physician. It doesn’t last. And frankly the ‘hazing’ of residency tends to pale in comparison to what I’ve seen RNs do to nursing students, and each other, even after long years in their field.
My nurses have commented on it over the years. Their observation is that the rite of passage seems to bond physicians together in (relative) solidarity over time, while RNs still tend to continue with lots of conflict.
Thanks for the recommendation! It’s a $99 book, so I don’t think it’s within my student budget. :eek: I’m so curious to see what it says, though. Maybe I can encourage some sort of group discussion at school, or a presentation on this. I’m planning on joining the Student Nurse Association when I get the chance, so perhaps I can suggest we focus on this subject.
So far, in my experience as a student, I’ve been really happy working with my peers. This is why I’m not on board with the “Oh, it’s just women” theory. My class is about 90% female. There’s been a lot of bonding among us, and there’s very little competition. It has been a pleasant surprise. No one seems to care what grades our classmates are getting (better or worse–doesn’t matter), and we’re all just trying to pass without letting the stress kill us. I started a study group, and it’s been one of the best experiences I’ve had at school so far. We’re all really nice people, and we help each other out when one person is sick or has a car break down, et cetera. There are people in my program who could call me at this very moment for a favor, and I’d run and do it, no questions asked.
Whereas this is, of course, a really good thing to say to a man. :dubious:
I do think the cooperation thing is key to understanding the situation, but my take is a bit different. Men try to shine by saying “I’m working more than everyone else” while women try to shine by saying “Nobody is cooperating except me”. Men are quick to point out extra work they’re picking up; women are quick to jump on someone else who they think is slacking. It’s just two different sides of the same ugly coin of office politics.
In any field, new hires are always work multipliers. So it easily follows that in a female-dominated profession like nursing that also happens to be chaotic, fast-paced, and labor intensive, rookies are going to be under intense fire from day one. Actually there are few professions that have all those traits, so maybe that’s why nursing is known for “eating the young” more than others.
I work with a bunch of nurses at a hospital, though IANANurse nor do I do any direct patient care, so keep in mind that I really don’t see what happens in the units.
But my take on this is that it’s not so much sex-related as job-related. Nurses are needed 24-7-365, and to maintain adequate staff levels there are rather draconian scheduling rules. New nurses work years on unpopular shifts, and once they finally get a better shift they have no real interest in covering if someone needs time off on their old shift. . There is a lot of “mandatory overtime” – if someone else doesn’t show up, you risk your own job if you decline to stay an extra shift and cover for the other person. It’s akin in some ways to being in the military-- a 9-5 weekday schedule is a distant dream to most nurses’ lives, and everything they do on the job is highly regimented. There is very little slack, and not much room for slackers. There is not much patience for slow learners either – if you are not contributing to the solution then you are contributing to the burden.
Nurses and most doctors will tell you that being a nurse is a much tougher job, day to day, than being a doctor.
I think women are biologically programmed to establish social order and enforce cultural rules on other women.
I think it’s because of “cooperative breeding”. I found that article while looking for a different one that I recall - a study that shows gorillas (pretty sure it was them) who raise their young in the community of other mothers have FAR higher survival rates.
If you’re going to raise young together, you’ve got to agree on some ground rules.
You should see how (many) mothers act online - when someone breaks stride, it gets pretty ugly.
I’m not trying to level a heavy criticism, I’m just looking for some opinions. It feels, to most of my friends in the field, like a “we walked uphill both ways and LIKED IT” message from the older crowd. Is that an example of doctors eating their young, or am I misunderstanding?