The robot-proof job men aren't taking - YouTube

When you imagine the “job of the future?”

what comes to mind?

Probably something like this.

Or maybe this.

These are the jobs expected to grow the most

over the next decade.

And if you look at expected growth

and the annual salary

there’s a clear winner ... nursing.

Other jobs might pay more

but future demand is a fraction of what it is for nurses.

Thanks to an aging population, in the US and around the world.

Despite the good pay and the high demand,

there's one group that has stayed away from nursing:

Men.

Nursing is still one of the most gender-segregated

jobs in the country with

one man for every nine women in the field.

So, what’s going on here?

Why aren’t more men taking these well-paying, in-demand jobs?

With staff shortages plaguing many ...

... on our way to a nursing crisis ...

... in hospitals all over ...

... international shortage.

In response to the worldwide nursing shortage

scientists have enlisted the help of robots.

These machines can lift and move patients

take vital signs

deliver medication

and even make scheduling and assignment decisions.

Nao robot: I recommend placing a new patient in triage bed T5

but contrary to the doomsday headlines

there's little chance these machines will

replace human nurses anytime soon.

In 2013, researchers at Oxford University

developed this scale. It measures how vulnerable

certain jobs are to automation.

The jobs where humans are least likely to be replaced

by robots require either creativity, expert perception and manipulation,

or high degrees of social intelligence.

Predictions are much worse for jobs where these

skills are less important.

Of the 700+ jobs in the Oxford study,

nursing was one of the least vulnerable.

With a less than 1% chance of becoming automated

in the next decade or two.

And when you watch nurses in action,

it's easy to see why.

The ability to build trust ... to connect ...

it's what makes nursing immune from automation.

And for decades, it’s also what’s kept men out of the profession.

Bill Lecher: Every time that there's a joke about a man that's a nurse ...

"Remember, we talked about him?"

(laughter)

"So, nurse not a doctor huh?"

"Kinda girly, isn’t it?” (laughter)

It still cuts a small little cut.

It still hurts a little bit.

You always feel it.

Scheltens: This idea, that nursing is a “woman's job”

it can be traced back to the 1850s.

To an English nurse named Florence Nightingale.

She cared for sick and injured soldiers during the Crimean War.

When she arrived at the hospital

Nightingale was disgusted by the squalid conditions.

Though she faced resistance from the male physicians,

she imposed strict sanitation and dietary guidelines.

And under her watch, fewer patients died of preventable diseases.

After the war, her methods were taught

in new nursing schools that opened up all over the world.

At the same time that women were being told their place was in the home

nursing gave them the chance to develop an identity outside of it.

But Nightingale was no feminist.

She saw nursing as a natural extension of what it meant to be a woman.

According to Nightingale, women had a natural capacity for caring.

Men did not.

They couldn’t attend Nightingale’s nursing schools,

which blocked them from the profession.

But the thing is, before Nightingale’s reforms

men had a long history as nurses.

Monks cared for the poor and sick across Europe

for centuries starting in the Middle Ages.

Men served as nurses during the American Civil War.

This includes the poet Walt Whitman

who described the experience in his poem "The Wound Dresser."

(male voice reading)

Fifty years after Whitman wrote this poem

the Army Nurse Corps was made up entirely of women.

By the time men were legally allowed to

rejoin the profession in the 1950s

nursing had become synonymous with femininity.

A link that was reinforced through advertising,

mass media, and popular culture.

And which in turn affected how we raised our children.

They absorbed the idea that men and women were born

with certain personality traits

which made them better-suited to certain jobs.

And while these traits were thought to be innate

we now know that they’re largely a product of our environment.

Marci Cottingham: Boys and girls are socialized differently, especially when it comes to emotions.

And the emotions that they're allowed to express.

Boys who are even in the infant age who cry

are more likely to be shushed or told not to cry.

Scheltens: Mothers are more likely to smile at their infant daughters than their sons ...

and they use fewer emotion words around preschool aged boys than girls.

Cottingham: Boys are socialized to stoically manage those emotions so as not

to appear effeminate or de-masculinized.

The biggest threat you can pose to a boy in terms of masculinity is to call

him a girl, or call him a pussy or a wuss, right?

Scheltens: So a job that requires making an emotional connection,

that requires expressing empathy -

a job like nursing -

there’s this assumption that men can’t do it

because they lack these inborn “feminine” traits.

Lecher: As a parent I was always pretty involved with my children so when her teacher

introduced me as, “This is Mr. Lecher, this is Katie’s dad, and he’s a nurse and works

at Children’s Hospital here in Cincinnati.

And I was surprised by the response.

Young children, five years old, said, “Well you can’t be a nurse.

because you're not Katie’s mom.”

What kind of messages do you remember getting

as a kid about nursing? And who becomes a nurse?

Chunn: Like the little white hats?

And the skirt

I think that as a child you'd always have this kind of

like feeling that nurses were nurturing and

people don't think men can be that way.

You just have to tackle some of those preconceptions

like "He's a man so he can't be gentle."

or "he can't be nurturing."

Josiah Shoon: I feel like it’s the twenty-first effing century,

How is this conversation still happening?

Tim Malinowski: “Oh you must be my doctor." And they start asking me questions.

Sammy Davis LPN: "Why didn't you become a doctor or anything?"

Jason Rozinka: "Did you fail med school, is that why you're a nurse?"

Scheltens: It's not just nursing.

Genetic counselors, physical therapists, and physician assistants

also have large gender imbalances

despite their higher than average salaries

and major projected demand.

Meanwhile, the economy is shedding the kinds of jobs

that have stereotypically been associated with men,

like manufacturing.

And that's reflected in this statistic:

The labor force participation rate:

that's the share of men in the US who are either working

or looking for work.

And it's been falling pretty steadily since 1954.

Our long-held beliefs about gender are clashing

with a new economic reality,

one in which emotional intelligence is vital.

In recent years, there's been a bunch of ad campaigns

aimed at bringing more men into nursing.

When sociologist Marci Cottingham looked at these ads,

she noticed that a lot of them

relied on the same gender stereotypes

that kept men out of nursing.

Cottingham: Extreme stoicism, masking emotion,

emphasis on athleticism. Looking rather stern.

Looking past the camera so they're not making direct eye contact

Tattoos, motorcycles, don't really have a lot to do with what's

required of you as a nurse.

If we use these stereotypical images

we might attract the wrong type of men into nursing.

This idea that, "I can still be a macho tough guy,

I don't need to deal with all that nurturing empathy stuff."

And so I think there's really a question here of

who's going to change?

Is it going to be the nursing profession, to try to attract more men,

or should we expect men to change?

Guy Beck: I think it takes a while to solve that

identity crisis. How can I be a man, a nurse,

and still maintain my manliness?

But now I sort of have this view that caring is probably

the most masculine thing a guy can do.

Scheltens: Caring, empathy, and trust are humans' strategic advantages

over robots.

And those skills don't belong to one gender.

They're like a muscle.

The more we build that muscle,

The better prepared we’ll be for whatever the future holds.