Male and female nursing applicants' attitudes and expectations towards their future careers in nursing

This research paper outlines a significant study into the attitudes and career expectations of male and female applicants to a university-based nursing course in the UK. The research is sound and based on an established tool by Finlayson and Nazroo (1997). It concludes that when embarking on their nursing careers male and female nursing students have similar career orientations and aspirations. However, they appear to develop divergent promotional objectives only after encountering the health service as employees, when the experience of working in the NHS, its structure and culture propagates barriers to female advancement up the nursing career ladder. The study develops from a critical and extensive literature review, which focuses on gender differences in nursing promotion and studies that explore male success in promotional advancement. The focus of the study is on the UK experience and it is postulated that it is the NHS employment culture that slows female promotion and career advancement. As such, it may be that a recommendation from the study could be to follow this up with a larger multinational study, looking at male and female career progression in different countries with different health services to test out the hypothesis that it is the NHS culture and employment structures that are erecting career advancement barriers.