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Learning Objective 1: discuss the role gender has played in nurses' practice environments, compensation levels, and legislative activities.
Learning Objective 2: identify gendered policies that have created a glass ceiling for women in academe and discuss strategies for policy evaluation and change.
Methods: Drawing on extensive interviews with nurse educators, this study examined women’s struggles to gain authority and respect in the academic profession and to use that authority to affect policy change. Hierarchies within academia place the status of women subservient to men and the crisis in the nursing profession could not be adequately explored without utilizing feminist critical analysis to highlight the disparities between men and women.
Results: Two major themes revealed in all interviews were: “Being a woman, nurse, and faculty member” and “Gender role conflict.” Six minor themes that expressed the richness of the major themes were: gender role orientation, reward and punishment in higher education, paradoxical communication, us and them mentality, lack of support within the profession, and more career opportunities for women.
Conclusion: Nursing is bound in an ideology based on women’s duty and members of the profession have had to battle sexiest beliefs, values, and biased policies. This research highlights that as women rise in academe, they are stymied at a certain level by the remaining hierarchal forces which in the past barred women from professional life altogether. These forces decreed a sharp division between men and women, assigning men to intellectual pursuits, women to emotional and relational ones
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