I'm not a men's rights troll and I got banned from /r/feminism for making a similar point. Just want to make that clear.

The reason men get paid so much more in nursing is simple - they can lift, roll, and handle fat people better than women, and in a profession where women far-outnumber men, per supply and demand, that makes men a the valuable commodity.

Nursing has the highest risk of back injury than any other profession in the United States. This is a huge problem facing the healthcare industry, costing millions of dollars in lost work and compensation for injury. http://ajcc.aacnjournals.org/content/12/5/400.full

In the end, hospitals in the states are a for-profit business, and naturally spend as little as possible to fix this literally massive problem. Offering a male nurses a higher wage than the next hospital is the capitalist way of addressing the issue.

Let me be clear, this isn't to say that the glass ceiling does not exist, and it most-assuredly has something to do with this disparity, but the lion's share of this figure is the simple fact that men are more valuable and in shorter supply.

In the end, neither men nor women are equipped to handle 400+ lb people and the problem needs to be fixed with existing technology and teams designated to lift obese patients. Though thorough acturial research into these injuries doesn't exist, I would venture that men are more likely to approach these tasks they aren't equipped for than a woman, and thus more likely to sustain an injury, but that is totally unverified.

The wage gap absolutely does exist, but there is more to this figure than that.

It's because nurses are responsible for handling an ever increasingly obese group of patients, and they are often under-staffed to deal with the problem. I don't think it's sexist to claim that men are physiologically better equipped to roll around 400+ lb invalids than women.