Why are most nurses female?

I could have added that young girls were then cheap to employ as well as plentiful in the labour market. So were (and still are) older women looking for work on night shifts and weekends that could be fitted in with the needs of their own families.

Elegran said it even better

Biology plays a part. As biological baby feeders women slot naturally into caring roles without any help or assumptions from "the patriarchy". Slowly, on a biological time frame you might say, this is changing and people of both sexes have more choice about what work they do.

Interestingly, even in the most equal societies (Scandinavian), women still, on average, make choices based on what we might call traditional female roles.

Nurses were traditionally women because women cared for helpless babies and children and so seemed by extension to be the obvious carers for the helpless sick and aged.

There was also the other tradition of "wise women" who knew the uses of medicinal herbs (and the appropriate spells and incantations) and could set broken bones.

It was customary too. until comparatively modern times, to exclude men from assisting at the purely female experience of childbirth,, where the helpers needed a knowledge of anatomy and physiology, painkillers, and psychology. (the men would - shock horror - see the private parts of a woman who was not their wife)

Sick nursing was regarded as an "unskilled" occupation, which could be carried out by anyone with a minimum of instruction. When my mother worked as cook in a fairly upmarket nursing home in the twenties and thirties, most of their nurses were recruited in rural Ireland and were, as she put it, "straight off the farm". Their concept of hygeine related more to the byre than to the ward. That was not unusual. In those days of limited education and opportunities for women, there was always an inexhaustable supply of young girls looking for unskilled employment.

It takes a long time for the association of an occupation with one sex or the other to change. How many female steeplejacks (or even Prime Ministers) have there been?

It's badly paid (and exhausting work), so men don't want to do it.

Were the gentler sex,it`s in the genes.
That being said,my first encounter of a male nurse was in 1969 when i had my tonsils out,it felt a little strange,but that was my age i think,i also had a male nurse treat a burn on y arm in Burnham and he was a delight.

Short answer it’s in our genes and chromosomes
Females of all species are more nurturing more caring and more moved by empathy, ideal attributes in nursing and caring. That does not mean all women are like that, nor that all men are the opposite, not just nursing, customer care of all descriptions are staffed by predominantly women.

Historically women have been viewed as caretakers. Early nurses were tasked with doing the care that included bodily fluids, etc. that no man would consider doing. Nuns were spared some of the disrespect by merit of being religious figures. Time passed and the females that cared for wounded in wars were thought to be “loose women”. History moves on and a few brave women (yes, Florence was one) dared to assert their mental skills and their ability to perform physical care and slowly, the transformation to today’s professional, highly trained nurses began. When I became a nurse in the sixties we were told by our professors to actively resist the “handmaiden” label. Men joined our ranks in larger numbers after working with nurses in the military and realizing it was a profession not limited by gender. Now retired, I am so proud of nurses today….professional, capable and either man or women.

i think in UK about ten per cent of nurses are male.

Obviously, due to gender roles

It would be interesting to know what the gender figures are of the current intake of student nurses and how the figures compare to past decades.

Tradition, nursing was seen as a caring profession and so came naturally to women. It used to be that most doctors were male and many medical schools had quotas for women students. Men came in and fixed things and then women did the nursing.

As SueDonim says doctoring is also now becoming a female profession. Whether this is because women who would have been nurses now apply to medical school, or whether it is because men, seeing all levels of careers in medecine being feminised are now choosing to enter different careers, is not clear.

It's historical, although there was a stronger tradition of male nurses in the military.
Although there are more male nurses now, there are also more 'technical' posts that are often taken by men eg: operating theatre technicians who do tasks that in the past would have been done by theatre nurses.
And of course, there is the matter of pay.........

Tradition, I reckon. It’s been slow to change although there are more males than there used to be.

More than half of doctors are now female, too.