Spotting men in the largely female ranks of the childcare sector is akin to a hobby for many nursery managers and owners who, I've discovered, share similar views and experiences when it comes to employing male childcarers:
* Men have a crucial part to play in early years care and education.
* Without making the salaries better, what man is going to work with us?
* Having a man as part of our team would ensure a different perspective.
* I employ a couple of men and apart from some teething problems, largely due to parents' attitudes, having them in the team is working beautifully.
The children love them.
* A lot of the mothers at my nursery have had bad experiences of men and would benefit from meeting good, reliable male childcarers.
* I have never had an application from a man, qualified or unqualified.
* My only male member of staff is likely to go on to train as a teacher leaving us back where we started.
* Most working patterns keep men away from their families for long hours - working 36 hours a week in a nursery would ensure they have time with their own families.
Less than 2 per cent of our early years workforce is male, and like it or not, childcare is still seen as 'women's work' and most men would never dream of joining the sector. It's time we worked on what is preventing or discouraging men from embarking on a career in the early years.
Having more male childcarers would bring enormous benefits, not least providing positive male role models for young children. Increasingly children are growing up in one-parent households, and all too often the first caring male they meet is in secondary school.
Pay is an obvious deterrent to men, but so too is gender stereotyping and indirect discrimination. Too often throughout the childcare sector, we celebrate differences in culture, but not gender. And there's no doubt that early years settings are prone to be all too feminine and not male friendly in culture and attitude.
As employers, we should promote the early years sector as a great career choice for both men and women. Granted there is still the problem of pay, and we can only increase salaries within our means, but we must do more to value diversity, rather than merely indulging in the rhetoric of equality.
We need to consider how we can 'sell' the job in advertisements when we next recruit, arrange for boys to do work experience in our nurseries, network with parents and raise the issue among our umbrella organisations, local authorities and trainers.
Mairi Maciver Clark is managing director of Mulberry Bush Kindergarten in Killearn, Glasgow, and director of the Scottish Independent Nurseries Association
