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Originally Posted by Beest
I like Danas comment about unfulfilled sales guys, similar thing in reverse
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It is changing I think, slowly but I think it is gathering pace. The idea of nursing as a credible and respectable career for young men to go into is becoming much more culturally accepted than it once was. I quite often see male nurses in tv shows now where they were kind of a novelty thing at one time.
The generation coming of age now seem to have a much more fluid interpretation of gender than ours in many ways. When I see my nieces and their friends together, and the way they talk about stuff just seems a lot less hung up on gender and notions of 'girl's stuff' and 'boy's stuff'. The boys seem way more comfortable and confident in talking about emotional matters than the boys of my youth, and the girls don't seem to consider that there may be any barriers in the way of them doing anything. Amelia is one of only a few girls in her cohort for her subject at university, and generally ends up in mostly male projects and she hasn't experienced any of that exclusionary behaviour that dogged a lot of the girls who went into male fields of study a few years ago (and I have heard tales of that still going on in a few areas) - the lads weren't remotely phased by having a girl in their group and just got on with working together and being friends.
These kids have grown up in an education system that really tried, consciously, to off-set some of the messages kids were being given about what was or was not for girls or boys. Hopefully, they mark the next leaps forward.
Some of the divisions are so arbitrary and ridiculous. The idea of a male nurse has only recently lost its novelty value in popular culture - yet that same popular culture assumes a paramedic is likely to be male.
It would be so nice if we could just draw and recruit the best carers and nurses and technicians and scientists from a pool of 100% of the population. Instead of shutting out, accidentally or deliberately, huge numbers of potential recruits just because we're hanging on to a narrow and reductive view of gender. Which is pretty much what Clod was saying.