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Purpose: Nursing remains a female-dominated profession around the world. The masculinity and male identity of men who choose nursing careers is questioned by the general public in many countries. Few studies report the situation of novice male nurses at their first year. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of novice male nurses when they first enter the workplace. Design and Method: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted using purposive and snowball sampling for recruitment. Fourteen participants, 21 to 25 years old, were recruited, all of whom had at least 5 months of work experience. On average, in-depth, face-to-face interviews lasted 1 hour, with more than one follow-up telephone interview per participant. Findings: The following six themes emerged from the transcribed verbatim data based on content analysis: choosing appropriate work departments based on personality and needs, facing the pressure and frustration of independent work, getting help, obtaining acceptance among female cliques, reflecting on the relationship between gender and profession, and concerns about dependents and financial needs. Conclusions and Implications for Practice: This study addresses masculinity issues and gender stereotyping. In addition, male nurses were very concerned about their career options and development and the likelihood of promotion. This research not only has implications for better understanding of novice male nurses’ needs and the challenges in their social life but also makes suggestions for nursing practice to attract and keep more male nurses in the nursing profession. The results illustrate how culturally congruent nursing care can be achieved when we more concern male nurses’ role pressure and address traditional gender sensitivity to promote male nurses’ career development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how Taiwanese commercials represent women and men, particularly men, in the family context as spouses and parents. A content analysis of prime-time commercials indicates that advertising representations of gender roles have made only slight and slow progress. Men are much less likely than women to be shown doing housework and taking care of children. When men are shown as nurturant fathers, their involvements with children are limited to playing with offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adopts the Critical Discourse Analysis approach in order to examine gender stereotypes in Taiwanese tabloid culture. Focusing on a gossip-filled entertainment column in a tabloid, this study collected 111 news reports released in May 2008. All news entries were probed to discern pervading gender stereotypes held regarding female and male artists. A subsequent online survey investigated any stereotypical depictions that had been identified. Administered to 120 respondents, this survey attempted to evaluate how representative views held throughout society were pervading gender stereotypes in media discourse. Results showed that female artists, as portrayed in the tabloids, were commonly associated with belligerence, money worship, and social pressures with respect to marriage and sexuality. By contrast, portrayals of male artists focused on personal defects in physical appearance and love affairs, and invariably involved manipulation of how the private lives of these artists were viewed. Most stereotypical depictions were further shown to be highly defined beliefs shared among the survey respondents. This article concludes with a discussion on the close-knit nature of tabloid culture and social ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing recognition of gender equality worldwide, plausible strategies that reduce young children's gender stereotypes remain limited. Cognitive-based interventions have been widely used in school settings and have been suggested to play important roles in children's gender stereotyping and in their processing of counter-stereotypic information. We aimed to determine whether exposure to counter-stereotypical information could break gender stereotypes in kindergarten children. Fifty-four children (61-79 months old) from two public kindergarten classes in northern Taiwan participated in this study. One of the two classes was randomly selected as the experimental group ( n = 28), and the other was the control group ( n = 26). The experimental group consisted of a gender equality curriculum including script relationship training for two months, while the control group continued their regular curriculum. The picture classification task (PCT) was measured before and after the intervention to assess gender stereotypes. Before interventions, 87.50% of the children chose a gender stereotypic relationship, while 12.50% chose script/other relationships in PCT. After the interventions, the gender stereotypic relationship dropped to 73.22% in the experimental group. Children in the control group were more likely to maintain their gender stereotypic relationship choices in PCTs. Our findings suggest that cognitive-based interventions, such as a gender equality curriculum, have the potential to break gender stereotypes in kindergarten children.