Bsking sent this to me,* then I started seeing it everywhere. As I worked in predominantly female departments at the hospital my whole career, I have some experience with this. However, I feel an extra need to be cautious thereby, as the people who are my examples each have personalities that I liked or didn't, and this may influence me too much to safely generalise. So let me start with just one observation about psych nurses working together. If that doesn't go too long I may go on to a second example.
When I started at the hospital in the late 70s, a lot of people still smoked. We didn't have to go out for smoke breaks, because you could smoke right on the units. We even rolled cigarettes for the patients, as that is a group that uses nicotine to "get normal." It is a stimulant that promotes short-term alertness by the very effective method of inhalation, but also calms the jonesing that crops up about 30 minutes after the last one. But nurses would take smoke breaks together a few times a shift. The line staff would resent it, because nurses got to get away from noisy, angry units of patients asking for more cigarettes and coffee, or demanding to know why they were still there, or had to take medications, or couldn't stay up all night. But we knew the answer and didn't bring up the complaint. They had important things to discuss and decisions to make.
While this was more than 50% excuse, it wasn't entirely untrue. Managing a unit of psych patients can be impossible. Particular diagnoses can create shift wars, or are litigious, or create danger for other patients. So for years I thought it was just their method of all getting on the same page, definitely a female one, but quite workable. I rather admired it as an informal, organic solution. Only when new approaches to women with Borderline Personality Disorder started to catch hold did I start to change my mind on that. In fact, it was well after the changes were underway that I questioned myself - and them. I began to see it as a constant power struggle over whose authority was going to hold the day. This also involved alliances and rewarding others with parts of their ideas being incorporated As this sometimes involved undermining decisions made by the doctor or by the whole treatment team (which had already made lots of compromises with each other) this could get nasty.
And I finally saw that getting to the best answer was not the point. I would kid about the Old Girl's Network, but it was truer than I knew.
I don't see nurses in teams anymore, only those with clearly-defined duties, so I don't know where this has gone. Nursing homes also have teams of nurses, but i no longer have any idea what the dynamics of those arrangements are.
No second example.
*She, my sons and I have been having email conversation. I will pass on that she has mixed feelings about this, seeing its point but wondering if it leaves out some valuable information. Here is the third paragraph of one of her emails.
It strikes me that a problem of feminism for a while was overgeneralizing the bottom 5-10% of men, but the new "things are too feminized" crowd actually seems to want to act like they don't exist. Any plan for "men" that excludes the most aggressive and violent men is missing a huge issue that every society spends a lot of effort on dealing with, and a quick look at homicide data reminds us that other men are the most likely targets for aggressive males. So basically, any time you go to corral the most troublesome men, you are going to get widespread female agreement AND widespread male agreement, meaning it will be easier to crack down.
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