Why is that? The data seemed especially striking because women don't just make up the overwhelming share of staff nurses, but represent about 90% of Chief Nursing Officers, too.
I took the question to our in-house think tank, the Nursing Executive Center. (Collectively, they have several hundred years of experience studying the nursing industry, working in it, or both.)
One reason, they suggested: Some may be where the nurses work.
"Anecdotally, I hear that many men enter the “high tech” nursing specialties—such as critical care," the Center's Jennifer Stewart told me. "These are often higher paid nursing specialties."
"Men also tend to aim for higher levels of education," Katherine Virkstis pointed out. "There are more men in RN programs than in LPN programs, and more men in BSN programs than in RN diploma or ADN programs."
(These trends are seen in Census data: Ben Casselman, writing at the Wall Street Journal, noted in 2012 that "male nurses are more likely than female nurses to have a doctoral degree, more likely to work evening or night shifts, and more likely to be immigrants." Meanwhile, "female nurses are more likely to work in doctor's offices or schools, and are far more likely to be over age 65—a reflection of nursing's status as a female-dominated profession until recently.")
There are other reasons that might not show up in an economic report, Center researchers suggested. Mused Joan Meadows, who worked as a hospital's Chief Nursing Officer before joining the Nursing Executive Center, men get fast-tracked into management positions. And men also may gravitate toward "oddball" positions that pay well, says Phil Beauchene (who has served in a variety of nursing roles, including CNO of a large, multi-specialty physician group). For example, men might become flight nurses on medevac helicopters, Beauchene points out.
And there’s one more perplexing fact about nursing salary data. Female nurses may get paid less, but on one measure they come out slightly ahead, Anne Terry notes: They're more content with their lot.
About 49.4% of female RNs agree or strongly agree that "my organization pays me fairly for my job," Terry says, drawing on 2013 Advisory Board Survey Solutions’ data from more than 70,000 nurses, compared to 47.5% of males.
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