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Hoag Hospital, where Martin said about 30 of the 900 nurses are men, has a recruitment effort directed at middle school students. While the message about the benefits of a nursing career is the same for men and women, Martin said he would like to see more boys take that message to heart.

Martin, like many male nurses, started his health care career as a hospital orderly. The son of a coal miner, he didn't have much growing up in West Virginia, but his family never turned anyone away who needed help. Armed with that strong family commitment to helping others, he pursued a career in nursing starting with an LVN program and then an AA nursing degree.

Although Martin said he always felt welcomed and nurtured by women colleagues at the beginning of his career, male nurses in the 1970s were such a novelty that patients sometimes had trouble adjusting.

In the beginning, he would always ask a female patient's permission to bathe her or perform other intimate procedures. After about three months, Martin realized that if he asked, they would say no. When he approached them with confidence, female patients were more accepting, he said.

Something to prove

Once, when Martin had to give an injection to a male patient, the man said, "I didn't know you were allowed to do that." When Martin asked what the man meant, he replied, "I didn't know housekeeping was allowed to give shots."

Today, it's more likely for a male nurse to be mistaken for a doctor.

"Some people acted disappointed that I was just going to be a nurse," said Richard Clapp, RN, a recent nursing school graduate who works on a med/surg unit in Mattoon, Ill. "I think there's a stigma attached to it. It's considered a female position."

Statements like "Why are you only a nurse?" or "You're too smart to be a nurse" haunt male RNs. Yet most chose nursing school over medical school for the same reasons female nurses say they made that career decision.

"I tell people I wanted to work with people, and it's the nurses who do that," Martin said.

Do men really make a difference in the nursing profession?

"I think what a nurse brings to the table is not because of hormones or genes," said Pamela Kidd, Ph.D., APRN, FAAN, associate dean for graduate programs and research at Arizona State University College of Nursing. "If a nurse has mastered the art and science of nursing, people do not care if their nurse is a man or a woman."

While female nurses might say they don't see any difference between male and female colleagues, male nurses say they have helped change the nursing relationship with physicians and patients.

As more men have joined the ranks of nursing, Martin believes the attitudes of male doctors toward nurses have improved. That is one big contribution men have made, he said.

"Male nurses have been less tolerant of the verbal abuse than women have been in the past," Martin said.

That attitude may have opened the eyes of doctors that it's not OK to treat any nurse with disrespect. Throughout his career as both a nurse and a hospital administrator, Martin said physicians have treated him in a more positive way than they do female nurses.

The communication difference between women and men is well-documented by linguists and sociologists, and male nurses say they see it on the job.

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