Magazine seeks to show men that nursing is viable career.

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Bob Kepshire was a groundbreaker more than two decades ago when he became a registered nurse, an almost exclusively female profession. Now he's breaking ground of a related sort, with Men in Nursing, the first national magazine aimed at what remains a very small market of male nurses in America.

"We're dedicated to increasing the number of men in the profession," says Kepshire, who has served since January in the dual role of the magazine's editor in chief and the director of emergency and community services at the University Health Care System in Augusta, Ga. "Our goal is to encourage men to choose nursing and help them manage the issues, stereotypes and gender-barriers they face," he says, noting that men are a big hope for solving the national nursing shortage.

Of the estimated 2.9 million nurses in the nation, only 5.7% are men, a figure that has doubled over approximately the same time frame that Kepshire has worked as a nurse--it stood at just 2.7% in 1980. On a positive note, that means the magazine, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins--whose other nursing-related publications include the American Journal of Nursing and Nursing 2006--has about 165,000 potential subscribers, though only 8,000 have signed up so far.

The first issue of the peer-reviewed bimonthly, which debuted in February, addresses everything from clinical care ("Seizures 101: Know the nature of seizures, from simple to complex") to personal issues ("How do we overcome the stereotype associated with being men in nursing?").

Interestingly, the lead writers on four of the five featured articles in the first issue are women, which only serves to highlight their continued dominance in the field.