Mentoring in Nursing and Healthcare

Supporting Career and Personal Development

Helen M. Woolnough, Sandra L. Fielden

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781118863725
• eBook ISBN: 9781118863732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

Mentoring in Nursing and Healthcare: Supporting career and personal development is an innovative look into mentoring within nursing, and its implications for career success. It provides an up-to-date review of the current research and literature within mentoring in nursing and healthcare, drawing together the distinctive challenges facing nurses and their career development. It proposes new directions and practical ways forward for the future development of formal mentoring programmes in nursing.

Offering fresh insight into mentoring principles and how these can be used beyond pre-registration nurse education to support personal career development. This is an essential book for all those commencing, continuing or returning to a nursing career.

Key features:

• Addresses mentoring as a career development tool
• Focuses on the individual benefits of being a mentee and mentor and how this can aid professional development
• Both theoretical and practical material is presented
• Features case studies throughout book
• Supports nurses to develop their careers
• It is sector specific but has transferability across disciplines
• A summary chapter draws together common threads or theoretical perspectives. The book concludes with strategies for future research and progress

Chapter 1
Gendered Career Development within Nursing and Healthcare

To understand the rationale for the Challenging Perceptions career development and mentoring programme, it is important to consider the wider environment within which nursing and healthcare are situated, for example the genderisation of education, the labour market and careers, and explanations as to why this happens (Broadbridge and Fielden, 2015). This chapter presents an overview of the career development of women and men in the workplace. It then moves on to focus specifically on the career development of women and men in nursing and healthcare, and apparent gender inequalities in the nursing career. It is widely acknowledged that many women do not progress in their careers in the same way as their male counterparts (Davidson and Burke, 2011; Vinnicombe et al., 2013; Mulligan-Ferry et al., 2014), thus it is important to begin by outlining gendered trends in education and the workplace.

Education

Recent figures from English exam boards suggest that girls outperform boys, and in 2014 girls outperformed boys at GCSE level within all subjects other than mathematics. Interestingly, this is not necessarily the case at A level and, worryingly, there are clear gender differences in subjects studied at A level (Arnett, 2014). For example, research conducted by the Institute of Physics found that in 2011 49% of state-funded, co-educational English schools sent no girls on to take A level physics (Institute of Physics, 2012). In contrast, physics was the fourth most popular A level choice for boys (ibid). It is perhaps no surprise then that there are distinct gender differences in areas of learning at university, with female students choosing more arts-related subjects and male students more likely to be found studying physical sciences, engineering and information technology (Higher Education Statistics Agency, 2013). Interestingly, this trend appears to have reversed in some subject areas. For example, medicine and law, once male-dominated subjects, have experienced feminisation and between 2010 and 2011 66% of all students studying law were women (ibid). These differences in subject choice at school, college and university have been shown to impact on career choice and ultimately affect the proportion of men and women in certain occupational areas (Paris and Decker, 2015).

The Labour Market

The UK has witnessed a dramatic increase in women's employment over the past 40 years, particularly among women with dependent children. At the end of 2014, 74.6% of women aged 16–64 were in work, an increase from 53% in 1971, and from 1996 to 2013 the number of working mothers increased by almost 800,000 to 5.3 million (Office for National Statistics, 2013a–2014). This increase is due to changes in societal attitudes and legislation, and the introduction of family-friendly policies, which have provided increased opportunities for many women to enter into and remain in the workforce. This change has also been experienced by many women in developed countries across the globe (International Labour Office, 2014). Despite this, women still face inequality (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2013) and women's employment is highly concentrated in certain occupations. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (2103b) show that in April–June 2013, women dominated occupations within caring and leisure, and accounted for 82% of those within these occupation types. The next most common occupations that women dominated were administration and secretarial roles and sales/customer service occupations, with the most common professional occupation for women being nursing. In contrast, men predominate in areas such as construction and information technology (Office for National Statistics, 2013b). Those occupations in which there is a high concentration of female workers also tend to be the lowest paid and the disproportionate segregation of women in certain occupations is commonly referred to as ‘horizontal segregation’ (Anker, 1997).

There is much evidence to suggest that ‘vertical segregation’ also exists in the labour market (Huppatz, 2015), and occurs when men and women in the same occupation attain different hierarchical levels. In this respect, men tend to be found in more senior roles, whereas women are concentrated at lower organisational levels. Figures suggest that nursing is a good example of both horizontal and vertical segregation (Nursing Times, 2010; Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2015). Although nursing is a female-dominated profession (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2007; Nursing Times, 2010), women and men tend to gravitate towards particular specialities in nursing. Proportionately more men work in mental health nursing than any other discipline within the profession (Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2006; Vere-Jones, 2008). Research has found that the mental health discipline is preferred by male nurses as the roles, activities and culture associated with mental health nursing allows men to express their masculinity in a profession dominated by women (Holyoake, 2002).

Furthermore, male nurses are concentrated in more senior roles. A survey by the Nursing Times (2010) found that male nurses are twice as likely to hold a top job in England's leading hospitals, which may be a reflection of the business ethos of foundation trusts that can act as a deterrent for women less inclined to apply for such leadership roles, or indeed be selected for top jobs. The apparent occupational sex segregation within occupations and organisations is detrimental to women because it has a negative effect on how men perceive women and how women view themselves (Smith, 2015).

In the UK, the number of men working part-time has increased in recent years, predominantly among fathers who are combining work with childcare responsibilities (Chanfreau et al., 2011). However, women remain considerably more likely than men to work part-time (Office for National Statistics, 2015) and labour market statistics between December 2014 and February 2015 highlighted that 42.5% of women worked part-time compared with 13% of men (ibid). The predominance of women working part-time is largely attributed to the childcare and other domestic roles (e.g. caring for elderly relatives) traditionally performed by women, which limits their ability to work full-time (Brown, 2010; Woolnough and Redshaw, 2015). Hakim (1996) argues that women who work part-time have a preference for domestic roles and a relatively weak labour force attachment, but Lane's (2004) work investigating the career of female part-time nurses in the National Health Service (NHS) has challenged this theory. Respondents in Lane's (2004) survey of over 600 qualified nurses working part-time in the NHS reported a high degree of under-achievement. Lane (2004) argues that people may be more likely to channel efforts into social and family issues because their career opportunities working part-time are significantly limited. This is not necessarily a reflection of lack of commitment to work: part-time workers, for example, often face disadvantage with regard to lack of access to training and development, being less likely to gain promotions and less likely to be provided with opportunities to supervise others (Burke and Nelson, 2002; Tomlinson, 2007). Also, there is a distinct lack of provision for part-time workers at senior organisational levels, which means that women can be forced to act in lower level roles due to the absence of more senior part-time positions they would be capable of filling, given the opportunity (Tomlinson, 2007; Wilson, 2013).

In terms of income, women are generally paid less than men. Figures from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (2013) show that female employees working full-time in the UK in 2012 earned 90.4% of the median hourly earnings of men (excluding overtime) who worked full-time, thus producing a full-time gender pay gap in hourly earnings of 9.6% (Perfect, 2011). Women working part-time in the UK in 2010 earned 61.2% of the median hourly earnings of men who worked full-time. This meant that the part-time women's pay gap was 38.8% (ibid). These figures also mask the extent of inequality and do not reveal differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs (Burke and Nelson, 2002).

Gendered Careers

The glass ceiling has been shown to exist even in occupations where women predominate, including nursing, teaching and social work (Davidson and Burke, 2011). Despite the higher numbers of women in such female-dominated professions, men still appear to occupy a significant proportion of senior positions. For example, approximately 90% of nurses in England and Wales are women, yet men are more likely to be found in senior roles (Nursing Times, 2010). Furthermore, nearly 70% of full-time qualified teachers in the UK in 2005 were women but just 36% of head teachers were women (National Statistics, 2010). In addition, female-dominated professions tend to pay less than male-dominated professions and are generally regarded as lower in status, despite comparable education and other requirements for entry into the role.

The inability of women to reach top positions is commonly regarded as a consequence of the glass ceiling effect. The ‘glass ceiling’ is a term first coined by the Wall Street Journal in 1986, and is an analogy used to describe the condition that keeps women and minorities from reaching senior positions in both public and private sector organisations in the UK and across the globe (Schein, 2007; Powell, 2010; Davidson and Burke, 2011). The term is used to reflect the ability of women and minorities to view the world above them but the metaphorical ceiling prevents them from accessing the senior positions they can view. This glass ceiling effect occurs when women and minorities with equivalent credentials to white men, that is, those who tradition...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Gendered Career Development within Nursing and Healthcare
• Chapter 2: Mentoring as a Career Development Tool
• Chapter 3: Diversity in Mentoring: Gender, Race and Ethnicity
• Chapter 4: Mentoring in Nursing and Healthcare
• Chapter 5: Designing and Implementing a Formal Mentoring Programme
• Chapter 6: Evaluating Formal Mentoring Relationships
• Chapter 7: Does Mentoring Work? The Realities of Mentoring from the Perspective of Both Mentee and Mentor
• Chapter 8: The Challenging Perceptions Programme and the Long-term Benefits of Mentoring
• Afterword
• Index
• End User License Agreement