A former student male nurse yesterday won a landmark sex discrimination case against NHS hospitals that refused to let him perform intimate medical procedures on women patients unless he was accompanied by a female chaperone.

The Equal Opportunities Commission said the ruling challenged assumptions that all men are sexual predators. It would help to open up nursing for men, who make up only 10% of the workforce.

The case was brought at the employment appeals tribunal in London by Andrew Moyhing, 29, who said he abandoned nursing because he was not allowed to do the job properly in a female-dominated profession.

During training last year at NHS hospitals and health centres in London he was denied the opportunity to provide cervical smears or electrocardiogram tests that might expose a patient's breasts unless he was chaperoned by a female colleague. He complained that female staff were allowed to provide intimate care to male patients with no chaperone present.

Mr Moyhing did not object to complying with the wishes of a woman patient who asked to be treated by a female nurse. But the patients were not given that choice. "This was offensive to me as a man, made me feel inferior."

Mr Moyhing's claims of sex discrimination had been rejected at an employment tribunal, which ruled that chaperoning was acceptable as a safeguard. But yesterday Mr Justice Patrick Elias decided on appeal that the chaperoning policy was unlawful. He asked Barts and the London NHS trust, where the former student was based, to pay £750 compensation. Mr Moyhing, who now sells financial services, declined the award to avoid diverting resources from the NHS.

Jenny Watson, who chairs the EOC, said sex discrimination was wrong whether it was directed at women or men. "The tribunal was right to find that it was not acceptable to have a chaperoning policy based on lazy stereotyping about the risks to patients and assumptions that all men are sexual predators," she said.

Mr Moyhing said: "I hope that this decision will herald the beginning of an era when nursing draws on all the skills of both male and female students. Male nurses are still seen as a bit of an oddity."

The Royal College of Nursing said NHS guidelines suggest all patients should have the choice of being treated by a nurse of the same sex. There was no monitoring of the chaperoning policy, but it was clear that male nurses suffered from a stereotype attitude that men could not care for patients in the same way women did.

Barts and the London NHS Trust said that by awarding Mr Moyhing the minimum level compensation of £750 the tribunal accepted the trust's view that he "displayed an exaggerated and unduly sensitive reaction to being chaperoned".