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The Mean Girls Club, or What’s Wrong in Nursing
I always knew I wanted to be a Nurse Practitioner (NP), even before starting nursing school, but I didn’t realize at the time one of the major benefits of being an NP: You’re not really considered a nurse anymore.
During my undergraduate clinicals, I started seeing the ugly underside of nursing, the side that students only hear about if they have nurses in their family: Nurses eat their young. At times it’s said almost jokingly, like a girl describing the awful band her boyfriend likes with a tone of, “I hate it, but that’s just the way it is, and I love him in spite of it.” As a student nurse, I would talk to any NP that would give me the time of day, and one of questions was about the interpersonal dynamics at the provider level: Are NPs catty to each other the way staff nurses can be? Everyone I spoke with said that the environment among providers was overwhelmingly better than being a floor nurse. So y’all can imagine how disheartened I was after spending the majority of my clinical hours this semester on a unit where the NPs are just as much a part of the Mean Girls culture as the nurses. One of the reasons I wanted to become a mid-level provider was to get above the fray, away from the backstabbing and snideness.
The real problem here isn’t my recent morale-crushing experience in the ICU, but rather the general Mean Girls culture in nursing, and the way little seems to be done to combat it. Channeling Regina and Gretchen might be okay in high school (if you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it now), but that kind of behavior is not only unacceptable for nurses, it’s dangerous. And it’s unfortunately all too common. When I typed in “bullying among” the first thing Google autofills to is “bullying among nurses.” That says a lot. There have even been articles written for the American Association for Critical-Care Nurses, American Nurses Association, and the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses about bullying in the nursing profession. New grad RNs tend to get targeted the most, and much like the Greek system, there is a strong tradition of hazing in nursing that ultimately puts the patient at risk.
Bullying contributes to the high turnover rate in nursing, and it’s not uncommon for nurses to work on a unit for six to twelve months before transferring to another unit or an entirely new hospital. High turnover rates affect health care costs more than you might think. Anytime a new RN is hired, there’s often a six- to eight-week orientation period, regardless of previous work experience, during which the new RN is paired with an experienced nurse on that unit. For those two months of orientation, the hospital is paying two nurses to do the job of one. Since nursing salaries are covered under the fee of the facility that’s billed, patients ultimately end up literally paying the price for nurses not being able to play nice.
But it can get even worse than just an increase in your hospital bill. Sometimes patient lives are literally put in jeopardy because of the Mean Girls culture. While I’ve never had a nurse refuse to help during a patient emergency, I’ve read stories of nurses who were left to fend for themselves while a patient was crashing. And I’ve chosen to handle a patient emergency by myself instead of asking for help from the other nurses (well, one particular nurse) who had created an adversarial work environment. It’s hard to bring yourself to ask for help when you feel you can’t trust the other person.
I’ve experienced the backstabbing, manipulation, and cattiness in almost every clinical and work setting I’ve been in as an RN and NP student. Fortunately, until this semester, I’ve been above the fray by virtue of functioning as an NP. But all of this makes me ask: Why is it that many times, when women are together in a group, they sabotage and tear each other down? Why are women often more critical of each other than we are of men?
I was reading something on Facebook about the division within my church over women’s ordination, and as someone pointed out, the most vocal critics of having women on the platform came from other women. I’m not convinced that it comes down to biology, as some would have us believe, or women wanting to gain the attention of the best potential mate. Women who are married with children can be just as mean as the single gals.
So what drives women to such lengths, even to the point of putting someone’s life in danger? Is it an innate desire for control? Respect? Status? Or are we perpetually stuck in high school, looking for the approval of the popular girls?
Published in General, Healthcare
Surely it is possible, but I think the likely cause is much deeper than that. I think there may be some hardwired issues at play here. We can overcome our natures, and that is basically the singular demand of civilization. Perhaps women just go feral quickly in that environment?
How competitive is nursing? Competitive work environments can create cattiness and back stabbing. Not saying a competitive work environment is a bad thing but it can create some negative side effects.
People wear different masks, depending on the situation. I had an employee who was the living embodiment of Uriah Heap when it came to our CEO (groveling, meek, seeming a perpetual victim), but a living vindictive nightmare to everyone else. To those under that person’s supervision, they played a game of making life hard while blaming upper management for the issues. They claimed to be the real one defending their charges, but they were really undermining their confidence and ability to succeed (it should be noted, as it may be germane to this post, that this person was female, and it was the other female workers who fared most poorly).
But masks can only be worn for so long. Eventually the facade breaks down, if you are around long enough. As a hospital patient, you likely would not be around long enough to see it.
Nurses also bully medical students and residents. Some residents become bullies, certainly, and go on to be attending bullies, but I suspect that the bullying culture gets started when those same people are bullied by nurses.
Wow. I spent 25 years in healthcare, and wasn’t aware that it was as bad as that. I’m not doubting you, I must have just missed most of it.
A few observations on nurses from a somewhat informed lay person:
Thank God for nurses.
Just a reminder to all you misogynist cretins. Not all nurses are women. :>
I’ve seen this kind of cattiness in other occupations filled mostly by women.
But one thing not directly addressed in this thread so far is the caste system of the medical community. As an outsider looking in, it strikes me that there’s this kind of bullying amongst doctors (not as male dominated a caste as it used to be, but still mostly male). And that doctors bully nurses. How does the interaction between the two fields, and the fact that doctors give orders to nurses, affect things?
Obviously, this thread has traction because we’re talking about women, mostly, not men (though I’d be interested in any observations that male nurses have and how they’re treated in this kind of environment).
Everyone assumes that alpha male dominated environments have bullying, but it’s generally more direct, at least in the lower levels. Obviously there’s more subterfuge in a male dominated C-suite of an organization (CEO and direct reports, along with the staff that works for them). But in the blue collar male dominated trades, things seem more direct and straightforward to me.
There’s been arguments by feminists that because women are the “gentler” sex that female dominated work environments are better environments. Well, no, they are just as susceptible as being bad environments as male dominated ones, just in a different way.
Of course, there are also work environments where there are a mix of male female. Those can be bad too, with women acting as martyrs with legal protection, and men forced to utilize more passive aggressive techniques to defend themselves.
LOL, this is true but the majority are still women. All the women in my family, including aunts, and cousins are nurses, but I do have one male cousin who is a nurse. I should ask him his experience.
Might it have something to do with changes to the industry which are increasing stress for nurses? Is there an increase in the ratio of patients per nurse, as there is of students per teacher? Are modern nurses burdened by significantly more regulations, paperwork, and other bureaucratic pressures than nurses were a generation ago?
If there has been a generational change, I wonder if it is more due to changed circumstances nurses work within or due to changed attitudes nurses bring into the field.
Also, I’ve never heard about the catty male nurses. :D
& female athletes don’t spit!
I’m a little surprised that you’re surprised. But from what little I know of you, your work experience seems to be primarily writing, an insular occupation. Perhaps that’s why.
My mother was a nurse in the 60s and 70s, and has told of very similar behavior, so I am not sure it is a generational thing, save that there were no NPs, and few female doctors. There were cliques then, and bullying too, though people did not view bullying the same way then. Emotionally, people were more stony and less outwardly fragile. If you were bullied, or held back by a clique, you just shrugged it off or moved on.
I have worked in IT all my life. At times I did desktop support. This often allowed me to sit in a cubes unnoticed with womyn in the other cubes around me. Eventually they would forget I was around and the conversation and actions changed to a womyn on womyn dynamic. This allowed me to be the fly on the wall thing during which I have observed a lot of womyn spitefulness, cattiness, that seems to manifest itself in very petty forms. Almost childish from a man’s point of view. Behaviors that a man would never do to another man.
After a while I came to the conclusion that the reason some womyn did this was because they could. Men don’t do these behaviors because they can’t. When two or more men interact there is ALWAYS the capacity for violence. It is in our nature. We are a violent gender. Say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing and you may find yourself getting your arse whipped. This proclivity towards violence tends to make men more respectful in actions toward each other. These respectful actions over time have become custom so that if a man acted in a the same way as your “mean girls” do that man’s friends and allies would let him know he was stepping out of the “man code” customs and if violence happened then he was on his own since from their point of view he had it coming.
My mother described some of the RNs (who were generally the floor bosses) she worked for as absolute harridans, especially toward the LPNs.
I hate to say it but it’s a woman thing. I’ve run a dental office for the past 9 years and drama among the all female dental assistants is legendary. I’ve gotten rid of most of the drama queens over the years but even the best team will develop rifts over time. I’m not sure what the problem is but it is definitely a problem.
I like to say if you have two women working together you have friends – if you have three you have a clique and an odd woman out.
As someone who hasn’t thrived in a hazing environment (I’ve done ok, but I have tended to migrate away from them), I do see the value.
The reason hazing, if done right, can make an organization or field tighter, is shared misery. It is why you see it in military organizations, and why you see it in other high pressure occupations like the medical profession.
As a young plebe, Douglas MacArthur was hazed at West Point to the point where he almost died. Yet he defended the practice for the rest of his long life. He wasn’t a stupid man (he had other obvious shortcomings) and had time to reflect on the advantages, as well as the obvious unfairness of the system. He was a “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” type of guy.
The arguments against hazing are not slam dunk arguments.
Actually, I’ve encountered some incredibly catty male nurses.
I was on the phone once with a male nurse and asked his name, as we are required to do for documentation purposes. I said, “Could you spell your name for me please?”
He said, “Yes, I know how to spell my name.”
That is a profound insight.
I think we can all agree that this type of behavior can be found wherever women congregate – teaching, PTA, sororities.
I call it “divide and conquer”, women can’t dominate and gain supporters physically so they do it with relationships. Just watch three very young girls spend a day together. There is always 2 against 1.
I think it is a negative aspect of female nature. The problem is, as Mate De mentioned, women are never corrected nor as children told they need to behave different.
My daughter is like me, wired like a guy. She went to an all girls high school. But it was a Catholic school and the girl behavior you would expect to see was constantly being challenged and not encouraged.
p.s. As I was struggling to type this on my phone, I see that Fake John/Jane Gault and Frozen Chosen made my points. (better, I might add)
I watch that dynamic at play every single day with my 4 daughters. The entire day is a battle of shifting loyalties.
I’ve heard the horror stories from my wife, and I think her experience in a hospital has made her deathly afraid of going to the doctor. Take into account what they deal with day in and day out. They spend all their empathy and emotions on caring for their patients, many of whom are uncooperative and sometimes hostile to their ministrations, patients are going to die on them from time to time, they see a LOT of the mistakes doctors make (and fix them), and they are constantly short staffed and overworked. They don’t have much patience left for anyone else by then.
You don’t know enough male nurses.
How about we say emotionally wired like a guy. As our society is in the throes of a transgender moment, I feel that clarity is needed
From observing my wife’s bosses (all female), and my experience with a number of female bosses, and observing how Mother and my sister run the family business (I chose silent partner and an independent career for a reason), I have to say that while I have had some bad male bosses, all my female bosses have been absolutely terrible, whether trying to manage a sales team through guilt trips (Mother immunized me at an early age) or Stalinesque cults of personality and networks of informants, except one, who was the best boss of all. She also happened to be an academic (I was working in a museum at the time) with strongly Socialist tendencies, so a few months ago we were chatting, and I told her my experience with my current female boss at the time, and I said, “Laura, you know, with my experience, I found it hard to vote for a woman, but having worked for you changed my mind and has allowed me to consider voting for (dramatic pause while she expected me to say Hillary) . . . Carly Fiorina!” She just laughed and told me to go to H-E-double-hockeysticks.
With three sons, my day was spent saying things like: stop hitting your brother, stop racing in the house, stop wrestling, stop spitting … wait, WHY do you want the duct tape?
Yes to all this. Many get out of nursing, or at least, nursing in highly regulated environments, because of this.
9/10 times I’d prefer to directly report to a man. What I’ve experienced is that while a man may be fast-tracked or working to get promoted, it’s worse when your female boss is trying to do the same thing. Most are ready to throw any or all of the staff under the bus to keep her name clean. I’ve often seen many women managers spend a great deal of time networking rather than spending time “working the work” or developing their staffs. We are all just a small marker in her quest to move up. I’ve worked for a few exceptions but by far most are career-driven to almost a crazed level.
Ummm. I agree with a lot of what you’ve said, Paula. And certainly women hold on to stupid stuff longer than men. But I think passive-aggressive behavior shows up in both sexes. The results are just different. Now see, you’ll possibly have to comment again! ;>)
This discussion made me go to YouTube, and look at clips from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s not as germane to this discussion, since the thrust is how women are treating other women and Cuckoo’s Nest is about a nurse who dominates weak, powerless men.
But you know that someone like Nurse Ratched also dominates her fellow nurses. The movie barely acknowledges that she has fellow nurses. This stereotype has a lot of truth to it.