Gender Matters: A Feminist Perspective of the Nursing Faculty Shortage

The nation is facing a critical shortage of registered nurses. At a time when the health care industry requires more nurses, the capacity of the nursing education system is diminishing. Drawing on extensive interviews with nurse educators, this book examines womens struggles to gain authority and respect in the academic profession and to use that authority to influence the nursing faculty shortage. Nursing is bound in an ideology based on womens duty and members of the profession have had to battle sexist beliefs and values. Hierarchies within the health care system and academia place the status of women subservient to men. Thus, the crisis in the nursing profession can not be explored without examining the relationship between the role of the nurse educator and the position of women. This book highlights that as women rise in academe, they are stymied at a certain level by the remaining hierarchical forces which in the past barred women from professional life altogether. These forces decreed a sharp division between men and women, assigning men to intellec-tual pursuits, women to emotional and relational ones.