Besides the pain, what bothered Yang Zhihong the most during an operation were the female nurses in the operation room.  "It couldn't be more embarrassing," said the 23-year-old senior student from Beijing Foreign Studies University, who underwent an operation at Peking University Third Hospital in March, for reasons of hygiene. "I just felt uneasy with women around me and my pants off, even if they're there to help with my operation."  That wasn't the first time Yang thought there should be more male nurses in the hospital.  "For a physical examination on private parts, it would be better to be helped by nurses of the same gender," he added.  While their numbers have increased in recent years, male nurses still only account for less than 1% of all nurses in China, according to the Ministry of Health.  In the United States and many European countries, the percentage of male nurses is around 10%, Beijing Peking University First Hospital head nurse Deng Jun said during a forum focusing on male nurses.  "We need to come up with more male nurses to meet the deficiency for male nurses in China," he said.  "The lack of male nurses is mainly due to the misconception that a nursing job is a disgraceful job requiring no technical skills with a comparatively poor salary," Deng said. "People hold the belief that men are too clumsy to clean a patient's body or take care of the sick. However, male nurses possess some unique features."  In some high-pressure and fast-paced working environments, such as operating rooms or emergency rooms, male nurses definitely have an advantage as well, Deng said. "It's difficult for a female nurse to turn over a paralyzed patient by herself in an intensive care unit. And during natural disasters, earthquakes for example, male nurses also play a vital role in rescuing victims and providing healthcare in a dangerous environment." Men make up only 1,900 of the 69,000 registered nurses in the capital, and they mainly work in the departments that are "labor-demanding", according to the Beijing Municipal Health Bureau.  "I've seen so many male nurses quit or resign in the past few years," he said. "With a basic salary of around 1,500 yuan, most male nurses simply find themselves cornered."  "Many students even reject their identity as a male nurse, out of the long-existing discrimination," Zhao said. "But nursing truly needs the male because of their rational thinking, physical strength and calmness in face of emergency and disasters."  Nothing will change "until the public changes its attitude and nurses' pay is raised", he said. A large number of men refuse to be a nurse partly because   _  .
they think nurses should get paid more than doctors they think it too tiring to work as a nurse they are afraid that they will be looked down upon they are afraid that they are unable to look after patients