Web Exclusive
Where are the guys?
Reasons the fairer sex remains the dominant player in the profession.
by Thais Carter
A number of female dental hygienists admit that they considered nursing before settling on a career in dental hygiene. The same can be said for a number of men in the field, including Charles Cort, RDH, MAT. Originally headed towards a career as a nurse practitioner, an injury led him to look for work that required less walking and standing. Nearly 30 years later, he is the director of the dental hygiene program at Shasta College in Redding, Calif., a school that just graduated three men and has two more gentlemen in the new class. “I am amazed that the dental hygiene profession isn’t more popular among men,” Mr. Cort says. “It’s baffling in that the pay is adequate to support a family, the work exists, and it is a good, stable profession.”
The problem, says sociologist Tracey L. Adams, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario, is the hiring process. While both nursing and dental hygiene both started out as “women’s work,” nurses primarily work in hospitals—large, public institutions—where people are more attune to things such as discrimination in hiring. “You just don’t get that in a private practice setting,” says Dr. Adams. Through the research for her paper “Professionalization, Gender and Female-Dominated Professions: Dental Hygiene in Ontario,” published in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (2003), Dr. Adams found that in dentistry, the authority relations have always been defined along the lines of gender.
“I don’t think a male dentist would want another man in the office because the division of labor has always been a gender one, with the male dentist as the authority and women as his support staff,” she explains. “And as women move into dentistry, that’s an even more powerful marker for them. If they have a male dental hygienist in the office, the patient might automatically assume that he is the dentist and that she is the hygienist.”
The experiences of the men profiled in the December issue of Modern Hygienist differ in regards to the discrimination they encountered, but as one aptly put it, “some [dentists] feel threatened by having a guy in the office, but to me, that doesn’t matter, because those aren’t the jobs you’d want to have anyway.”
To provide further background as to how dental hygiene ended up as stereotypically “female,” we asked Dr. Adams some additional questions.
MH: How did you come to choose dental hygiene as a profession worth researching?
TA: I come from a long line of dentists. People have been practicing dentistry in my family since the mid-19th century, and I was interested in the broader field. I had previously studied dentistry and as a profession and its historical development. I was very much interested in looking at the significance of gender to it.
In my research I found, historically, that gender was very important to dentists and also how dentists structured their relationships with other workers, such as dental assistants. Less so, I think with dental hygiene. In regard to dental assistants, dentists talked very seriously about wanting a woman that would help give an air of respectability to the place, who would be a good helper. Later, they talked about how it was important to have a woman around so that they could remind you to get a haircut or sew that button on and keep shoes shined. It was a very gendered relationship that struck me as interesting.
For dental hygiene specifically, the fact that I’m based in Ontario also made it an attractive profession to look into. I study occupations in general and what was interesting about dental hygiene in Ontario is that it was legally defined for women; men couldn’t practice there until 1968. Sociologically, it’s an interesting thing because there aren’t a lot of occupations that have formally prevented men from doing them.
MH: How did it come to be illegal for men to practice there?
It was a roundabout decision. The Ontario government gave dentists the right to create the job of “dental hygienist.” The dentists then went and said the only way to be a dental hygienist was to take the training program that they set up, and that program was restricted to women. Other than men trained through the military, no man could enter the program of the profession until the late 1960s.
MH: With its implications for periodontal health and actual work inside the mouth, dental hygiene seems like even at its inception it would have seemed “too technical” for a woman to do. Why do you think male dentists in Ontario chose to, in establishing the profession, to specifically seek out females?
My theory in how it developed in Ontario—in some pockets of the US developed out of the public health movement in the early 20th century—is that by the time it was created and regulated as a profession it was the 1940s and 50s in Canada. Dentists at that time were having a lot of trouble with dental technicians, today’s dental lab professionals, because they were making dentures for people without a dentist’s prescription. Dentists were fighting dental technicians over independent practice.
They went on to choose women to fill the role of dental hygienist because they thought women would be more accepting of dentist’s authority and less likely to practice illegally. I think that’s the only reason that they chose women or at least the main one. There’s not a sense in any of the literature that I’ve read on dental hygiene that describes expectations in an “office wife” format the way there was for dental assisting. They wanted to maintain the authority in the office and the easiest way to do that was to have women who they believed would be more accepting of it and less likely to practice on their own. Dental hygiene, as far as the content of the job, doesn’t have anything that defines it as a “woman’s job.” It’s more of the authority of the relations and the way that’s been structure.
MH: Do you think men will ever have equal footing in the dental hygiene profession?
I think it’s hard to say. I would expect the numbers to stay low because I’m not sure that dental hygiene is going to be a particularly attractive career for men in terms of benefits. And, of course, a lot of dental hygienists piece together a full time job by working in multiple practices, and that’s not as attractive from a “provider” standpoint.
The movement of men into dental hygiene would happen to a greater extent with the change in the scope of practice. In Ontario, we’ve recently had changes where dental hygienists can now practice independently of dentists; that will bring more growth. If opportunities for autonomy increase, the percentage of men will grow, but I don’t see it climbing above 10-15% in the forseeable future.
 | 2 of 2 |
