“Are you going to be wearing a white skirt and a hat from now?”

That was one of the first things I heard when I told relatives I had been accepted into nursing school. It was a joke — at least that’s how it was delivered. But the meaning behind it wasn’t funny.

In my South Asian community, nursing is seen as women’s work — important, but low-status. For a man to choose this path was, to many, confusing or uncanny. It meant I’d be in a caregiving role, not something typically associated with the societal norms of masculinity.

That early ridicule stayed with me. I had almost locked that comment deep within until it made its way right back.

One morning, when I introduced myself as a nurse to a patient, he looked confused and said, “Can you call the nurse for me?” Despite standing at his bedside, with a stethoscope around my neck and a hospital identification badge hanging right on my scrub top, he didn’t see me as a nurse—perhaps because I didn’t look like what he expected.

I am a South Asian male nurse with brown skin and a slight accent. And in many eyes—patients, colleagues, even sometimes leadership—I am an anomaly.

In my culture, nursing is not a profession commonly embraced by men. It’s often seen as an extension of domestic caregiving—important, but not prestigious. In Canada, while the narrative around gender equity is more liberal, there’s still a prevalent expectation of what a nurse and nursing leadership “look” like. And often, the expected criteria doesn’t match someone like me. On multiple occasions, I have heard my patients, or their loved ones, asking me if it was common for the guys from my home country to work as nurses. A question wrapped in innocuous inquisitiveness, yet packed with a strong emotion of disbelief—an implicit reminder that, despite the liberal and progressive outlook of Canadian health care, men of colour in nursing are still perceived as anomalies, constantly having to prove their legitimacy.

Throughout my career, I’ve learned that the values I was raised with—humility, deference, quiet competence—can be misread in Western health care settings. In nursing school, I was described as “too quiet,” “too reserved,” or “not assertive enough.” But in reality, I was being thoughtful, respectful, and deliberate—qualities my culture taught me were essential in caring for others.

It wasn’t that I lacked confidence. It was that my confidence didn’t come with volume.

While working in the ICU, one day, I noticed subtle cardiac changes in a patient and escalated my concerns to the team. My persistence led to a timely intervention that may have saved the patient’s life. I worked diligently, leading the patient to a phase of clinical stability, yet my Canadian colleague whom I handed over the care to was recognized for keeping the patient alive. I stayed invisible in the narrative—even as my clinical judgment proved correct.

I’m not sharing this for sympathy or validation. I share it because I know I’m not alone. Many racialized health care professionals experience this kind of misrecognition. Our ways of communicating, advocating, and leading don’t always match the dominant mold. But that doesn’t make them any less effective.

Over the years, I’ve built a quiet but solid reputation. I now facilitate professional development sessions for the ICU nurses, lead orientations for new staff, and colleagues, even much senior to me, ask for my guidance. I’m trusted not because I changed who I am—but because I consistently stayed who I was—quiet, but competent. I learned how to translate my values without abandoning them.

Leadership doesn’t have to be loud to be effective. And competence doesn’t always come in a glamorous confident tone.

What we need in health care is not just diversity in numbers, but diversity in how we define excellence. We must start valuing cultural humility, emotional intelligence, and quiet strength as much as assertiveness and visibility.

If we want a health care system that truly reflects the communities it serves, we have to expand our understanding of who belongs—and how they lead.

So, the next time when someone asks, “Can you call the nurse?” I’ll quietly smile and say, “You’re already talking to him.”

Viksit Bali is a nurse.