I hope I’m wrong, and that men are still making inroads into elementary education. I’m thinking about an attitude I’m hearing more around these parts, where at least five minutes of every 6:00 PM newscast is devoted to child predators, that men shouldn’t be trusted with young children if they’re in a position of power.
Another place where males are making inroads: retail positions in clothing stores catering to teens and young adults. Back in the 1980s, stores like The Gap, Chess King (YO!), Jeans West and the like used to be staffed almost exclusively by women. Today, the retail workers at Hollister, Abercrombie and Fitch, American Apparel, and, yes, The Gap, are mixed.
What are nurses who happen to be male called in French and German? The normal words for nurse in those languages are soeur and Schwester. I think this goes back to the time that most nurses were nuns, but that is just a conjecture.
Ahem. I know this is a hijack and all, but the reason why there is a shortage of large animal vets is more complex than just the high prevalence of weakling girls. It is easy to point to the gender imbalance because that’s what is most visibly obvious, but it probably has a lot more to do with the rising percentage of students coming from urban areas. More people nowadays associate vet med with doggie health care. In years past, they were a lot more apt to think of cows and horses. Veterinary student bodies simply reflect public perception. Unless you can show some stats that show a disproportionate number of male graduates go into large animal medicine even after background is controlled for, I have little reason to blame genitalia on what we’re seeing .
Of all the large animal/mixed practicioners coming out of my class, almost all of them are women. All the men (with the exception of one, maybe) gravitated to small animal medicine. The one thing that the large animal vets have in common is the fact that they were raised in a rural environment where the care of large animals is a way of life. Because there are fewer and fewer people out there with this particular background, it should come to no surprise that we’re seeing fewer vets that want to devote their lives to large animals.
I feel like rolling my eyes at this, sorry. As a woman, I encourage you not to go around saying such disparaging remarks like this about female veterinarians. It’s insulting and ignorant. Seeing how I was taught how to sew up “Mr. Amish Farmer’s cow prolapsed uterus” by two veterinarians who happen to be women (who grew up on farms, by the way), I hope you see why I feel this way.
“Stewards” and “stewardesses” have been called “flight attendants” in the industry for some time. I presume the name change came about as they changed the focus of these jobs from passenger comfort to passenger safety.
It has not been my experience that the person serving in these roles are now just as likely to be male as female, but perhaps that varies by airline.
Every nurse’s office in my Health Center in Spain says “enfermera”. My doctor’s nurse has a beard (so, he’s an “enfermero”). There’s been proposals to change the signs to “enfermería” (which means both “sickroom” and “the profession of a nurse”) but so far no go.
And the winner is “changing nappies” (diapers). Guys of my dad’s generation would eat yellowcake , straight no chaser, before changing one.
In Spanish the word “enfermero” makes you think of ordely, particularly in psych wards. The only “male nurses” (sorry) you find, aside for the extremely rare exceptions, are in military hospitals. The “Colegio de Enfermeras” (College/Association of Nurses) uses the feminine.