Individual-Related Factors Influencing the Striking Gender Inequality in the Nursing Profession, a Cross Sectional Study among Nurses and Student Nurses From Selected Hospitals and Nurses Training Institutions in the Northern Cities of Uganda.

Introduction: The study discovered that the striking level of gender inequality in the nursing profession, is partially influenced by some individual related factors like gender where male are only 26.4%. This striking numerical gender inequality, has positioned the few male especially those at a care giving role, at a more risk of psychological abuses from the patients/attendant, fellow nurses and other health professionals. Patients/attendants wrongly calls them doctors while some of their female counterpart and other health professionals says they are academic failures who have failed to be doctors. This is psychological abuse and gender discrimination in the female dominated profession. For that reason, the study has exposed that some of the youthful male in the profession, are suffering the effect of psychological abuse evidenced by them avoiding the nurses’ uniform and putting on scrub clothes in order to confuse and meet public expectation of them being doctors. In addition, the 3.7% Muslims is an outstanding religious affiliation disparity in the profession. The 43.3% of the gender discriminated nursing professionals were told that they are academic failures but this study has dismissed that claim. It has confirmed that all the nurses/student nurses has attained the minimum set standards by Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports to professionally train with the main aim of saving life though graduate nurses are still few at only 6%. The study has unveiled that 9.1% of the nurses have joined the profession because of mistreatment of patients/attendants by some nurses. Much as most of the nurses/student nurses were motivated to join the profession to help the sick, some were for employment opportunity and others because of the nurses dressing code. It has been found that there is a gradual generational mind set change about the profession being a female profession to a gender neutral profession. 78.5% of the respondents proof it by saying they would recommend both gender to join the profession since they are all capable of serving and saving life. But, there is still a mixed feeling about the male in the profession, some nurses and student nurses saysthey are academic failures, some are using nursing as a stepping stone to their next medical profession while some respondents
said that some of the male in nursing are very good, very knowledgeable, hardworking and caring than the female nurses. All these finding justifies individual related factors influencing gender inequality in the nursing profession. The main study objectives was to established the factors influencing gender inequality in the nursing profession among nurses and student nurses from the selected hospital and nurses training institution in the Northern Cities of Uganda. The specific objective was to determine individual related factors influencing Gender inequality in the Nursing Profession among the respondents from the study sites. Methodology: the study used a cross-sectional study design to obtained quantitative data from the respondents in Gulu, Lira and Arua Cities. Trained research assistants used a pretested structured English questionnaire to obtain the raw data which were single entered and analyzed using statistical software version
26. Frequency tables and graphs were used to describe the study variables. Univaraite and bivariate analysis methods were used to identify factors associated with gender inequality. Variables with P-value of

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.