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Kevin's avatar

I love your work. Let me segue from your reply to a comment in your last post. I’m a middle aged black queer male who has been a nurse for almost thirty years. Previously I was in computer science.

My best friends mother was a nurse and devout Catholic. I was working for McDonnell Douglas, then the manufacturer of the worlds greatest combat airplanes. She said I should give up helping warmongers and come help people. I listened.

At the time men made up about 4% of nurses. I bet most were queer. Today it’s over 10%, mainly for the money. In fact, I hate to say, the salaries have risen initially because of the entrance of men.

We are doing well in dispelling stereotypes despite the fact that sometimes, when I walk in a room I am mistaken for a doctor. Men care. And queer men are excelling greater than our straight brothers. Why?

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Jack Kammer's avatar

It’s good to see Social Work included among the fields where we need more men. Like police, social workers often apply subjective — and biased — criteria to their decision-making and case-handling. Social workers have huge influence on fatherhood, families, family dissolution, family reunification, child custody, kinship placements for children who must be removed from abusive homes and other life-altering situations. One divorced father has called them “feminist plainclothes police.” In fact, the Council on Social Work Education, the main accrediting body for schools of social work, offers an annual Feminist Manuscript Award. (Imagine if the accreditors of Library Science schools were to offer a Republican Manuscript Award.) Jonathan Haidt reminds us of the need for viewpoint diversity, sorely lacking in social work. To make matters even worse than the demographic numbers would indicate, at least one study (Rudman and Goodwin, 2004) found that women exhibit 4.5 times as much in-group bias as do men. The Sisterhood, as we have heard, is powerful.

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