A vital revision to the "Women in dentistry" series.
I have been interviewed several times over the last few months by Dominic Sadic for an article he is writing on women in dentistry. It will appear in the December issue of "Inside Dentistry". He asked me to review his article and make some suggestions. In reading his article, I realized he and I missed including one of the most important developments in history's influence on the gender shift in dentistry - birth control. Duh! Thank goodness for the intenet and the ability to make this revision. The revision is in italics. Here is the revised lead in of "The Gender Shift" article: "There is a wave of women dentists surging through dentistry. ISOC is attempting to discover the impacts this gender shift will have on dentistry. A logical starting place is to look at the demographics of women in dentistry. What precipitated this gender shift? In the U.S., prior to the early 1970's, dentists were almost exclusively male. The U.S. had the lowest percentage of women dentists in the Western World: roughly half of the dentists in Greece were women, about one-third in France, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and almost four-fifths in Russia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.1 Two reasons led to this gender shift: One was the women's liberation and civil rights movements of the 1960's and early 1970's with the attendant federal legislation to fund grants and encourage increasing enrollments of women in professional health schools. The second was the impact birth control had on opening the doors for a women to a professional career because most women could choose when to have children. Both of these developments were radical and changed centuries of prejudice against women as doctors. Birth control stands as one of the greatest biological and cultural changes in history. Without birth control, even with encouraging federal legislation, women would have had a much more difficult time graduating from dental school if they had children. The following figures are from the ADA, Survey Center, 2003 Distribution of Dentists in the United States by region and State and the 2005 Survey of Dental Education. I was unable to find comparable statistics in a Google search of the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. (Thanks to Jeff Gartman Reference and OnLine resources librarian of the ADA Library for help in researching these statistics)" 1. Health Professions - Dentistry. Washington University School of Medicine. 2004;1.
To read the whole article go to: The Gender Shift, the demographics of women in dentistry. What impact will it have?
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