Your Stories

I am a male nurse. During my nurse training I felt sexually harassed by my fellow students on multiple occasions. The ratio of male to female students was around 60/1. I had female student nurses constantly making inappropriate sexual comments towards me. I was touched, repeatedly, I had my groin grabbed on numerous occasions. I felt intimidated and uncomfortable. But as a man, we just have to laugh it off.

Meeting with my educational supervisor during which I informed him I was pregnant. He said he had thought that might be the case because my breasts were much bigger than they had used to be. I was speechless and nervously laughed it off. Could feel my face burning from embarrassment. Found it challenging to focus on the rest of the meeting without constantly fixing my clothing to keep myself covered.

I was being sexually harassed by a patient. I felt frightened and did not feel safe at work. I went to see a male colleague for advice who specialises in this kind of risk management and whose role it is to advise on issues like this. He told me there is nothing I can do other than to eat 10 doughnuts every night.

On one ward I worked on, I received comments about my appearance from male staff almost every day. Some of the staff would very obviously look me up and down slowly before saying anything. I received frequent comments about whether they thought I had gained or lost weight, what they thought of my hair that day, what my facial features looked like, whether I was look tired or my skin was looking glowy… it was relentless and was always something. I tried to dress in a plain and conservative way, did not wear makeup and kept my hair the same every day so that there was less to draw attention to my appearance. I felt so self conscious of my appearance during that job. I just wanted to do my job and do it well and didn’t want to feel like my looks were always being evaluated.

Our ward was mostly staffed by female Band 2 and Band 3 Health Care Assistants (HCA’s). The male Matron was keen to employ some males and said that we would never be able to appoint men at this banding because men wouldn’t work for this level of pay. He pushed to get Band 4 HCA posts in the service, stating more publicly that it was to get a better skill mix and that these posts would take on more responsibility. Males were subsequently recruited to the Band 4 posts, whilst the female HCA’s continued to work at Band 2 and 3. On paper, they should have had different roles but in reality they carried out all the same duties. All of the Bands were officially open to all genders, however there was a clear gender divide in who got recruited to which Band.

My ES (male) told me that if I want to make it in surgery as a woman, I need to keep my head down, be as unobjectionable as possible and do everything anyone asks me to as no one likes an outspoken, demanding female.

I was keen to apply for a position that I had seen advertised and so spoke with the Consultant Psychiatrist in the team to express my interest and find out more about the role. She told me that she is keen to appoint a male to the position so that they don’t end up with someone who then goes on maternity leave.

I am in a management role and lead a large team. I have had several experiences of men within my team who are much more junior than me being invited to represent our discipline in senior meetings or on interview panels instead of me and without any consultation with me about this, despite them not being qualified enough to take on those tasks. I have never experienced a woman in my team being invited in my place to given tasks that are above her level of seniority. This has been frustrating and when it happens, it leaves me disempowered and undermines my ability to effectively fulfill my leadership duties. It also creates challenges in managing those male staff going forward when my authority has been undermined in this way.