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Darius Kucinas, general practice dentist and co-founder of Dental Reviewed, highlights the problem of gender bias in dentistry.
Medicine has spent years documenting gender bias among physicians. Pay gaps, patient trust, career penalties tied to motherhood – all of it has been measured, published and argued over in journals for a decade or more. Dentistry never got the same treatment.
So we ran them! We surveyed 500 women working in dentistry across the US, UK and Canada. The findings put figures behind a set of experiences a lot of women in this field have had for years without ever seeing them written down.
Vendors treat the room differently
I watched this happen to a colleague a few years back. A rep came in to pitch a CBCT unit – a type of X-ray scanner which can create detailed 3D images of the teeth, jawbone, nerves and surrounding structures – and she was the owner, the one signing the check. He spent most of the meeting addressing me instead. I wasn’t even on the payment side of the conversation. She corrected him twice. He kept drifting back to me anyway. At the time, it read as clumsy. Reading the survey results, it reads as a habit.
As many as 43% of surveyed women reported being treated differently by a vendor or sales rep because of their gender. More than one in ten (14%) were quoted different financing terms than a male colleague, to their knowledge. Another 12% suspected it happened without being able to prove it.
The open responses kept circling one specific sequence. A woman asks for the same terms a male colleague received. She’s told the offer expired. Weeks later, the identical offer reappears for him. That exact pattern showed up again and again, across practices with no connection to one another.
Patients bring their own assumptions
Bias doesn’t stop at the supply closet. Getting on for half (46%) of respondents said patients question their competence at least occasionally. One in four has had a patient ask to be switched to a different dentist, specifically because that dentist is a woman.
Associates take the worst of it. A third report a reassignment request, compared with 16% of practice owners.
Then there’s parenthood, which is where the survey’s numbers get harder to sit with. Of the 283 respondents who are parents, 73% report a career setback tied to having children. Reduced hours that never went back to full-time, delayed partnership, or patients lost to colleagues during leave. Only 10% received fully paid leave while 30% received none.
Geography changes the shape of the problem but doesn’t solve it. UK respondents reported the highest rate of unpaid leave, at 40%, largely because self-employed associates there don’t qualify for statutory maternity pay. US respondents reported 28%. Canadian respondents reported 22%, the lowest of the three, still nowhere close to fixed.
Women now make up close to 40% of the dentist workforce across all three countries. Practice ownership hasn’t kept pace with that shift. Female dentists remain less likely to own a practice at every career stage, and separate research out of Canada found they earn 21% less than male dentists after adjusting for hours and region.
What respondents actually asked for
Respondents named specific changes, not vague hopes. Real part-time partnership tracks, rather than part-time roles with no path forward. Reduced hours read as reduced hours, not as reduced commitment. More women involved in setting leave policy, since the people deciding it are often the people who never took any. Clear protections for self-employed associates and practice owners. A guaranteed patient panel on return from leave, so nobody comes back to an empty schedule.
A written leave policy costs almost nothing to put on paper. A protected patient panel costs even less. Training vendors to treat every dentist in the room as a decision-maker costs a single conversation.
Most dentists I know like to think the job comes down to steady hands and good clinical judgment, nothing else. Our survey at Dental Reviewed says otherwise. It’s been going on for a long time. Now there’s data to back it up. What practices do with that is up to them.
