Gender Matters: A Feminist Perspective of the Nursing Faculty Shortage

The nation is facing a critical shortage of registerednurses. At a time when the health care industry requires morenurses, the capacity of the nursing education system isdiminishing. Drawing on extensive interviews with nurse educators,this book examines women's struggles to gain authority and respectin the academic profession and to use that authority to influencethe nursing faculty shortage. Nursing is bound in an ideology basedon women's duty and members of the profession have had to battlesexist beliefs and values. Hierarchies within the health caresystem and academia place the status of women subservient to men.Thus, the crisis in the nursing profession can not be exploredwithout examining the relationship between the role of the nurseeducator and the position of women. This book highlights that aswomen rise in academe, they are stymied at a certain level by theremaining hierarchical forces which in the past barred women fromprofessional life altogether. These forces decreeda sharp divisionbetween men and women, assigning men to intellectual pursuits,women to emotional and relational ones.