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Minority Nurses in California Face Barriers to Advancement

According to the RN Satisfaction Report, a national job satisfaction survey of 76,000 nurses published earlier this year by the American Nurses Association, the respondents as a whole reported “being highly satisfied with regard to interactions with other RNs, their professional status and [their] professional development opportunities.” But another new study reveals that for nurses of color it is often a different story--one of isolation rather than interaction and of barriers to professional advancement instead of opportunities.

The study, conducted by the Discrimination Research Center (DRC), a civil rights research organization based in Berkeley, Calif., surveyed 1,080 African American, Asian American, Latino, Filipino and Caucasian RNs throughout California--a state where people of color make up 50% of the population but only 33% of the RN workforce. The goal was to examine the relationship between ethnicity and job satisfaction, workplace relationships and opportunities for advancement. DRC found that minority RNs tended to report lower levels of job satisfaction than their white counterparts, with barriers to advancement, denial of promotion and workplace isolation heading the list of complaints.

Compared with Caucasian RNs, significantly higher rates of minority nurses reported that there were barriers to getting promoted. African American and Filipino nurses were the most likely to report being denied a promotion, with 44% of minority nurses citing race or ethnicity as the perceived reason for the denial.

Even more disturbing, the findings suggest that many minority nurses don’t even bother applying for a promotion because they believe they have no chance of getting it. For example, even though more than half of Filipino nurses knew about current opportunities for promotion, less than a third said they had applied for one. In contrast, only 39% of white nurses knew about current promotion opportunities in their workplace, yet over half of them had applied for one.

Despite the fact that nurses of color were generally more satisfied with their workplace relationships than white nurses, almost one-fourth of Filipino nurses and one-fifth of Asian nurses reported that their supervisors had been unnecessarily critical of them. Furthermore, one out of five nurses surveyed by DRC felt that their coworkers were not comfortable with diversity. Minority RNs were also more likely to feel isolated by other nurses in the workplace. About 12% of African American and Asian nurses reported isolation as a problem, compared to only 2% of white nurses.

“The nursing workforce should adequately reflect the growing diversity in California’s changing demography, and further effort should be made to promote diverse and inclusive workplaces,” DRC concludes. “It is in the best interest of all Californians that health care employers, nursing associations and nursing unions take steps to more effectively address issues to increase the satisfaction of their nursing workforce, improve workplace diversity and ensure that all nurses, regardless of ethnicity, are able to advance and thrive.”

The complete study, Job Satisfaction and Advancement of Minorities in Nursing, is available online at DRC’s Web site, www.drcenter.org (click on “Research”).