Men In Nursing
Fostering Diversity & Engagement: Student Leadership Roles as a Recruitment Tool for Men in Nursing
Posted: August, 2026
Somali Nguyen, DNP, CRNP, AGACNP-BC, shn@uab.edu
Assistant Professor, Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing
Nicholas Seay, BSN student, naseay@uab.edu
Pre-licensure Student
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing
Historically, the nursing profession has faced a significant gender gap, leaving a vital segment of the potential workforce underrepresented in clinical practice. Promoting gender diversity within nursing is essential to address critical nursing shortages and to align the clinical workforce with the diverse demographics of the patient populations we serve. Recruiting men into nursing introduces unique communication styles, varied perspectives, and valuable caregiving approaches. This diversity is vital to support healthcare expansion, advocate for vulnerable
patient groups, and advance evidence-based clinical practice in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
The American Association for Men in Nursing (AAMN) serves as a cornerstone for supporting pre-licensure male students. Nationally, encouraging men to choose nursing is increasingly critical due to the post-pandemic demand for competitive, stable careers and the evolving expectations of the caregiving role. However, professional organizations and local academic chapters often struggle with a lack of student engagement, a lack of student perspective, limited new ideas, and a shortage of structured mentorship opportunities. This deficit represents a major missed opportunity for student professional development.
Despite the clear advantages of having men in nursing, local chapters of professional organizations, such as the Birmingham chapter of AAMN, have historically struggled with minimal student engagement and limited participation. Without active student representation, local chapters suffer from a lack of fresh student perspectives, stagnant ideas, and inadequate clinical and academic mentorship connections. This gap hinders the professional development of pre-licensure male nursing students, who often feel isolated during their educational programs. To bridge this gap, chapters must design innovative leadership pathways, such as dedicated student board positions, to engage pre-licensure students, foster professional development, and create a sustainable, supportive peer-to-peer mentoring network.
How We Can Use Student Board Positions for Recruitment of Men in Nursing
To address these challenges, the Birmingham At-Large Chapter of AAMN implemented a structured leadership model by integrating pre-licensure nursing students directly into student board positions. This methodology operates across three key dimensions:
Fostering Shared Governance and Leadership Skills: By placing pre-licensure students on the board, chapters invite them to actively participate in shared governance. This responsibility allows students to gain and amplify their sense of self, while directly
augmenting the foundational leadership skills introduced in their undergraduate programs.
Structured Mentorship Chains: Incorporating student board members facilitates a unique, multi-directional mentoring environment. Students work closely with experienced faculty, clinical nurses, and peers to develop practical leadership, clinical, and personal skills. Rather than a single transactional relationship, this model establishes a continuous "mentorship chain" where professionals mentor students, who in turn mentor newer peers, successfully navigating the transition from mentee to mentor.
Active Engagement and Peer Outreach: Student board members serve as the primary drivers of outreach and community connection. They lead visible engagement events, such as educational tabling, community service projects (e.g., “CANstruction”), and interactive clinical skills demonstrations, such as teaching blood pressure measurement and physical assessment basics to younger students. Because peer-to-peer recommendations carry substantial weight, these student-led initiatives serve as highly authentic, first-hand recruiting tools to attract more men into the nursing pipeline.
The integration of student board positions within the local AAMN chapter yielded exceptional outcomes, highlighted by a 500% increase in student membership in 2024. This dramatic growth demonstrates that giving students a voice in leadership proves that professional organization involvement is a meaningful journey rather than a simple resume booster.
Ultimately, this initiative benefits everyone involved:
For Students: It increases feelings of connection, belonging, and community, while providing exposure to professional events, collaborative feedback, and research opportunities.
For Professionals: It offers a rewarding opportunity to pass on clinical expertise, act as visible role models, and network with the next generation of practitioners.
For the Profession: It enhances visibility, builds a stronger community, and drives advocacy to push the nursing field forward together.
By empowering pre-licensure male nursing students with real administrative and leadership responsibilities, academic chapters can foster a vibrant professional network that actively recruits, supports, and retains men in nursing.
References
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Reframing the Narrative: Recruiting the Next Generation of Men in Nursing
Posted: August, 2026
Author(s):
Somali Nguyen, DNP, CRNP, AGACNP-BC, shn@uab.edu
Assistant Professor, Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing
Andrew Semegram, MSN, CRNP, FNP-C, ENP-C, asemegram@uabmc.edu
Director, Emergency Medicine Advanced Practice Provider Education
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing
The persistent gender gap within the healthcare workforce remains a complex challenge for nursing leadership. Recruiting more men into the profession is essential to building workforce capacity and directly improves clinical outcomes by aligning the clinician population with diverse patient demographics. Nursing is heavily stereotyped as a female-dominated occupation, an impression that continues to deter potential male applicants from considering it as a viable career path.
Recent academic data reveals that male representation in nursing has not only stagnated but experienced a modern regression. According to the National Nursing Workforce Survey published by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), the percentage of men in the registered nurse (RN) workforce decreased from 11.2% in 2022 to 10.4% in 2024. Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that men comprise roughly 10% of the overall nursing workforce, pointing to a systemic, cross-cultural underrepresentation. Research demonstrates that career preferences and societal gender roles solidify early in adolescent development, making early-stage interventions critical. Middle school and high school students heavily weigh peer opinions and visible role models when evaluating future professions. Waiting until undergraduate enrollment to actively recruit men into nursing is an ineffective strategy because alternative fields have already captured their interest. Therefore, targeting younger cohorts during formative years is necessary to de-bias the profession and expand the male enrollment pipeline.
Traditional academic recruitment frameworks fail to reach young men during their primary periods of career consideration in middle and high school. Most institutional recruitment strategies focus exclusively on college-age applicants, leaving adolescent boys exposed to outdated cultural stigmas that portray nursing as a non-masculine, ancillary role. Because young men rarely encounter male nursing role models or high-acuity professional narratives early in life, they systematically self-select out of nursing pathways in favor of other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or emergency response careers. Without early, visible, and tactile exposure to the advanced clinical realities of the field, the recruitment pipeline for men will remain constricted, compounding national nursing shortages and limiting workforce diversity.
To overcome ingrained societal stereotypes, schools of nursing and professional chapters such as the Birmingham At-Large Chapter of the American Association for Men in Nursing (BCAAMN) can deploy targeted clinical demonstrations at public events and youth career events hosted by organizations such as Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA).
This experiential approach changes the narrative of nursing through three tactical dimensions:
Tactile Engagement with High-Acuity Skills: Incorporating interactive, hands-on simulations, such as the American College of Surgeons’ “Stop the Bleed” training, advanced wound care suturing models, and high-fidelity cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) drills, reframe nursing.
By emphasizing the intense physiological, technical, and life-saving components of practice, these demonstrations appeal directly to students interested in high-autonomy, fast-paced STEM disciplines.
Early Intervention in Middle and High Schools: Strategic outreach must deliberately focus on younger educational tiers. Partnering with middle school science fairs and high school career days allows male nursing instructors and students to provide early exposure. Giving a 13- or 14-year-old male student the opportunity to apply a combat tourniquet or analyze an automated external defibrillator (AED) reading breaks down the “women’s work” stigma before it solidifies into an absolute career barrier.
Visible Peer and Professional Role Modeling: Public events provide a powerful platform to utilize male nurses and pre-licensure male students as the primary presentation leaders. Seeing men operate complex clinical equipment, lead emergency protocols, and discuss advanced practice roles (e.g., flight nursing, nurse practitioner, or nurse anesthesia) provides younger students with an authentic blueprint for success. This representation normalizes male presence in healthcare, validating nursing as an elite, gender-inclusive specialty.
It must be noted that the strategies suggested above rely inherently on traditional masculine frameworks (e.g., high-acuity scenarios, autonomy, the tactical engagement of bleeding and death). This is purposeful, meant specifically to attract young men who have already absorbed some degree of the misogynistic notion of nursing as “women’s work.” Using this is by no means an endorsement of such notions; rather, it is leverage to initiate a paradigm shift with regard to the gendered perception of nursing. Bringing these young men to the nursing profession, although not a complete “fix” for the structured sexism that often exists in nursing (e.g., gendered pay disparities), can help them forge professional identities without the burden of gendered notions of caregiving. Early exposure to the full, relational reality of nursing, not merely its tactical entry point, gives this paradigm shift the opportunity to take root before gendered stereotypes solidify.
Diversifying the nursing workforce requires a proactive departure from passive collegiate marketing toward active, early-stage community engagement. When young men experience the physical, intellectual, and life-saving reality of nursing in middle and high school, systemic gender stigmas begin to dissipate. By investing in early-tier outreach and highlighting visible male role models, academic institutions can successfully cultivate a sustainable, diverse, and
resilient nursing pipeline equipped for future healthcare demands.
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