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Men are largely missing out on one of the hottest professions in the U.S. right now: nursing.
For registered nurses alone, the Labor Department projects there will be 189,000 job openings each year for the next decade. But only 1 in 8 nurses are men.
There have long been efforts to rewrite the script around nursing — to push back on the idea that it's women's work. Now, the economy is helping, too.
With diminishing opportunities in male-dominated industries like manufacturing and software engineering, nursing has emerged as a stable alternative and a solid pathway to a middle-class life.
Nursing students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are already experiencing what it's like to be in demand.
Ethan Stinson will graduate next month and go straight into a job in the psychiatric unit at the university hospital.
"I feel like it's really easy to get a psych job if you're a nurse," he says. "They're hunting people all the time."
His classmate Hatim Nasser, whose family had wanted him to study computer science, has a job lined up in the university hospital's heart and lung transplant intensive care unit.
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