Commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing and carried out by the RCN and Oxford Brookes University, the study argues that the “old-fashioned view that caring for others is a feminine characteristic still persists in British society”.
Some nine out of 10 nurses in the UK are women. Their weekly pay is on average £15.42 per hour - less than a third of that of doctors and dentists.
The study’s authors, from the Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice and the Oxford School of Nursing and Midwifery – both at Oxford Brookes University - and the RCN, found that not only do nurses “routinely take on tasks that would have previously been the preserve of doctors”, but are constantly pushing forward advances in nursing practice. However, their pay does not reflect this.
Nursing is a graduate profession, reflecting the high-level technical and clinically skilled nature of the work.
Nicky Hughes, RCN Wales Associate Director of Nursing (Employment Relations), said: “Nurses are educated, highly skilled and proficient in delivering excellent patient care. This important research is essential to illustrating the role that nurses contribute to health care and how it should be valued in terms of pay and conditions and status.
Nurses reported a lack of recognition for all their efforts, not being paid for doing overtime or staying late, and organisations increasingly relying on their goodwill to perform these duties. Never has there been a better time to reassess how we value skills that are the key components of caring roles such as nursing.”
The study provided a breakdown of the gender pay gap, which showed that, unlike the rest of the health sector, differences are largely the result of gender differences in working hours rather than sex discrimination.
Despite the fact that women make up 90% of all nurses they fill less than a third of senior positions and earn on average 17% less than men in similar positions per week. Nurses from an ethnic minority background tend to earn 10% less than their white colleagues, when other factors are taken into consideration.
Dr Kate Clayton-Hathway, Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, said:
“Concerns were also raised regarding the well-being of nurses, primarily because of high levels of work intensity and unsafe staffing levels.
“In terms of career progression, increasing numbers are choosing flexibility over career development largely because of a lack of choice or control over working patterns or working hours, a paucity of family care provision and lack of support for training and development.
“Nursing suffers from an image that fails to match the reality of a professional life defined by high level technical, emotional and cognitive skills. This image, which is underpinned by gendered notions of nursing and nurses, will always stand in the way of any efforts to improve the standing and attractiveness of nursing as a career.”
