The ethics of care and masculinity: The case of men who choose to be pediatric nurses

Varia
By Françoise Lointier, Francis Gold, Jean-Michel Hascoet
English

The ethics of care formulated in 1982 by Carol Gilligan states that men and women do not have the same moral concerns. The main objective of this work was to determine the moral concerns of men who choose to be pediatric nurses, a primarily female occupation (in France in 2010, 1.3% of nurses specialized in pediatric care were men). Population and method: the population was composed of a non-representative sample of male pediatric nurses recruited using chain sampling. The method consisted in a qualitative survey in the form of face-to-face interviews carried out by a single female investigator. Results: eleven men were interviewed between January and May 2013. Analysis of the interviews showed that, although they display classical nursing and masculine values, moral concerns that characterize the ethics of care were present in almost all of them (10 out of 11). Discussion: the defining feature of this study was that the investigator encountered happy health professionals. It is therefore suggested that this is explained by the fact that this group of men combine, in an apparently harmonious way, moral concerns traditionally assigned to men and women.

Keywords

  • ethics
  • care
  • masculinity
  • nursing
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