Simply a Matter of Being Male? Nurses’ Employment Outcomes in the Norwegian Labour Market

The gendered segregation of the labour market is well documented: men tend to be employed in more prestigious and powerful jobs compared with women, even within female-dominated occupations. The research that describes the male privilege in nursing rarely problematizes, however, that these men belong to the majority ethnic population. Qualitative studies from the US and Norway show that men of minority ethnic origin experience discriminatory practices from supervisors and colleagues that can have a negative impact on their career mobility. An important insight from those studies is that it is not only gender that shapes careers, but the particular intersection of gender and ethnicity. But to what extent are the employment outcomes of ethnic minority and majority male nurses characterized by similarities or dissimilarities? The current article uses individual-level administrative data to investigate and compare employment outcomes among ethnic minority and majority male nurses in Norway. More precisely, we investigate the likelihood of being employed in long-term care, psychiatric care, and somatic hospitals. Our empirical approach is to estimate employment outcomes by gender, ethnicity, and their interaction. Based on this, we can determine whether it is primarily gender, ethnicity, or gender and ethnicity in combination that predict any intra-occupational segregation of minority and majority ethnic male nurses. The results show that minority ethnic men are over-represented in long-term care and under-represented in hospitals compared with majority ethnic men, whereas both men of minority and majority ethnic origin are over-represented in psychiatric care. We conclude that employment in health care organizations considered more congruent with “masculinity” is most pronounced among male nurses of majority ethnic origin. The results also reveal an emerging pattern of intra-occupational segregation with a clustering of minority ethnic nurses in long-term care, and this tendency is particularly pronounced among male nurses.