The profession's title literally means "to suckle at the breast." If it were commonly called something like "doctor's aid" I'd bet it wouldn't be as pronounced a problem.
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If that were true then you could check it by looking at the male nurse prevalence among non-English speaking countries.
In French, Italian and Spanish a nurse is some variation on "infermier" coming from the same root as the word for "sickness", and they don't have higher rates of male nurses.
In German it's the truly awesome word "Krankenschwester" meaning something like "sickness sister". Obviously this is gender-specific and has nothing to do with my point, but I just learned it and felt the need to share.
I tried a few other languages in google translate but didn't know them well enough to figure out the etymologies. If anyone knows of non-gender-loaded "nurse" words in other languages it would be interesting to hear them.