Paying the Caring Tax

The current featured article for ANS is titled “Paying the Caring Tax: The Detrimental Influences of Gender Expectations on the Development of Nursing Education and Science” authored by Candace W. Burton, PhD, RN, AFN-BC, AGN-BC, FNAP. You can download this article on the ANS website while it is featured, and we welcome your doing so and returning here to share your comments! Here is a message from Dr. Burton about her work:

This paper is the result of a lot of professional soul-searching, and thinking about how nurses are treated and treat one another in different environments. As nurses we can, in many ways literally, do anything—but we have allowed ourselves and our profession to be held back by outdated ideas about who and what we are. I wrote this paper because I feel so strongly that we have come to a critical point in our professional, educational, and scientific growth. This moment is for nursing both laden with potential and weighed down by tradition. It is time for us to shed once and for all the old ideas that position nurses as subservient to other disciplines, as ministering angels, as perfect “ladies,” rather than as the independent, creative, scholarly, assertive, and forward-thinking professionals that we are. At this historical and professional moment, it seems to me fundamentally important that nurses call openly and honestly for the implementation of social justice in our professional and personal communities, and that we start with cleaning our own “house”—our educational, scientific, and practice institutions. Who we are as a profession must not be constrained by stereotypes about gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, appearance, socioeconomic background, or anything else that we would not allow to influence our provision of safe, effective, non judgemental care.