Monday, February 26, 2024

A Man in Healthcare

What’s it like to work in healthcare as a man in a field dominated by women?

By Shawn Kelly, PSW, Steward, Local 302 Board President

To start, let me give you a little background about myself. I got into healthcare almost by accident. When I was a student, I did some volunteer work with a charitable organization run by a doctor in Toronto. He had a gentleman living with him who had MS, and he asked me if I would be open to helping to take care of him.

I had never done this type of work before or even considered doing any kind of personal care on an individual. It was challenging but it opened my eyes to a whole new field that I had never considered before.

In the early ’90s, I worked in assisted living helping predominantly males with disabilities. The workplace was evenly split with half men and half women. The men worked with male residents and the women worked with female residents.

After 1992, I got away from healthcare, and it wasn’t until 2007 that I got back into the sector again. I worked in acquired brain injury from 2007 until 2010. There were a mix of men and women in this field, so it was not dominated primarily by women as other fields in healthcare are.

In 2011, I started to work as a PSW in long term care. In my first job, there were maybe four or five men in the entire home, and the rest were all women. It was an eye-opening experience for me as I had not really worked in a field where men were in the minority.

I have worked in long term care since then at various homes. The current home I work in I’ve been at for almost eight years. Most of the staff and management are women.

I guess I can say that working with women has taught me a lot of things. I’m much more in tune to women’s issues and women’s equality in the workplace then I have ever been before.

Growing up as a child in the ’60s and ’70s during the early stages of the women’s liberation movement, I was not as in tune to women’s issues until much later in life. I grew up as most men in my generation did as a bit of a chauvinist.

When I was in high school, girls were pushed to take home economics classes to learn how to cook and take care of the home. Boys were pushed into taking shop class to learn trades. But I did grow up in a home where both of my parents worked, so both my mother and my father provided income for the household.

Still, for most of my life as a teen and into young adulthood, I was not in tune with many women’s issues. Women were seen as not being able to do a lot of the thing’s men could do. Times have obviously changed, and so have I—for the better.

Are women equal in our society? No, but things have come a long way since the ’60s and ’70s.

Working in healthcare, a field still dominated strongly by women, has changed many of my attitudes. I am a strong believer in the equality between women and men and will challenge beliefs or opinions contrary to that. I’ve learned to respect women more and treat them as equals.

Healthcare is seeing more men enter the workplace as today it’s not seen just as a field for women. Similarly, more women are entering trades and workplaces that were traditionally dominated by men. All of this is a positive move in the right direction, making real equality for women in the workplace and in society.

A Man in Healthcare

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