What percentage of nurses in the US are women? What about globally? So why is a man like Lucas Davis the CEO? Why is the new CEO also a male?

Jason Allen holds the title of CEO-designate at Sigma Nursing (formally Sigma Theta Tau International, the world's largest nursing honor society). Sigma identified Allen as CEO-designate, and he is providing day-to-day staff leadership while the board searches for a permanent or interim replacement for fired CEO Lucas Davis.

So the pattern holds. Davis was not a nurse, and he joined Sigma from the International Coaching Federation, and the organization said at the time that selecting a non-nurse chief executive reflected an emphasis on operational expertise. Allen comes from a membership and engagement background. Allen has served as the Chief Membership and Volunteer Engagement Officer at Sigma since mid-2025.

Why this keeps happening

This is not a Sigma problem specifically. It is a structural one that runs across healthcare. Women build the institution, do the daily work, and then watch a hiring committee reach for someone with a "corporate executive" profile, which skews male by default. The search firm that placed Davis, Sterling Martin Associates, ran what was described as an extensive candidate search, and it still landed on a man with no nursing background.

Sigma did establish a separate chief nursing officer position in 2022, which is the organization's way of threading the needle: keep a nurse at the clinical and professional helm, bring in an operations executive for the business side. That structure is not unusual, but it does mean the CEO role, the most visible and highest-paid seat, is effectively open to non-nurses, which widens the pool in ways that historically favor men.

The board that makes these decisions is elected from the membership, and Sigma is governed by elected nurse leaders, meaning women are in the room. That makes the outcome harder to explain as simple exclusion. What it more likely reflects is the same bias research documents everywhere: when a committee evaluates "executive leadership," the default image is still male, still corporate, still external. Credentials in HR, operations and global management read as CEO credentials. Decades at the bedside often do not.

Until the profession rewrites what "leadership experience" is allowed to mean, the nursing workforce will keep being 87% women while the office at the top keeps being occupied by someone who has never held a chart.