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Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation
Recently, the issue of the gender gap in dentistry and in the leadership in the dental field has placed new challenges on dental profession representatives and politicians. Indeed, the inequity between genders in healthcare workforces represents a limit to the progression of those in the professions...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10048370/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36981485 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060828 |
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author | Bernardi, Sara Fulgenzi, Maria Bruna Rovera, Angela Rinaldi, Fabiola Trichilo, Sara Bianchi, Serena |
author_facet | Bernardi, Sara Fulgenzi, Maria Bruna Rovera, Angela Rinaldi, Fabiola Trichilo, Sara Bianchi, Serena |
author_sort | Bernardi, Sara |
collection | PubMed |
description | Recently, the issue of the gender gap in dentistry and in the leadership in the dental field has placed new challenges on dental profession representatives and politicians. Indeed, the inequity between genders in healthcare workforces represents a limit to the progression of those in the professions, inhibiting talented colleagues from accessing high positions in the academic world and not providing adequate role models to inspire future generations. The Italian population practicing dentistry in 2021 was composed of 74% males and 26% females. The aim of this study is to analyze the level of the gender gap in the dental field in Italy by focusing on the gender distribution of professional leaders in institutional category associations and invited speakers at dental conferences accredited for the Continue Education in Medicine program. The search strategy considered three different fields in the national dentistry scene: the dental committee boards, the union category associations, and the cultural field. The roles in the dental boards were retrieved from the website of the National Medical and Dental Committee from 2018 to 2022; the roles in the union category associations at the provincial, regional, and national levels were retrieved from the related web pages, considering the period from 2018 to 2021; and the information about the speakers at national conferences from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2021 was retrieved from the National Agency for Regional Health Services (Agenzia nazionale per i servizi sanitari regionali (AGENAS)) websites. The extracted data were grouped and examined using descriptive statistics (frequency), and due to the categorical nature of the data, non-parametric tests (chi-square tests) were used to assess any differences between the two genders. The null hypothesis was that there were no statistical differences between the two genders’ distributions. A p-value was considered significant when <0.05. In addition, aiming to understand the representation of male and female dentists, a comparison of the distributions of males and females in the dental boards with the percentages of female and male dentists operating in Italy in 2021 was performed using a binomial test. The analysis of the data regarding the composition of the dental boards and of the union category association boards revealed a statistically significant difference in the distribution of the roles between the two genders at the regional and local levels, with a p-value of <0.05, and a significantly low representation of the women practicing dentistry (p < 0.05). In Italy, women practicing dentistry are underrepresented in dental organizations and in cultural events, given the low numbers of female dentists in leadership and/or speaker roles in the years 2018–2021. Even though the glass ceiling effect continues to affect Italian female dentists, initiatives and political measures have been taken to improve this condition and reach gender equity. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10048370 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-100483702023-03-29 Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation Bernardi, Sara Fulgenzi, Maria Bruna Rovera, Angela Rinaldi, Fabiola Trichilo, Sara Bianchi, Serena Healthcare (Basel) Article Recently, the issue of the gender gap in dentistry and in the leadership in the dental field has placed new challenges on dental profession representatives and politicians. Indeed, the inequity between genders in healthcare workforces represents a limit to the progression of those in the professions, inhibiting talented colleagues from accessing high positions in the academic world and not providing adequate role models to inspire future generations. The Italian population practicing dentistry in 2021 was composed of 74% males and 26% females. The aim of this study is to analyze the level of the gender gap in the dental field in Italy by focusing on the gender distribution of professional leaders in institutional category associations and invited speakers at dental conferences accredited for the Continue Education in Medicine program. The search strategy considered three different fields in the national dentistry scene: the dental committee boards, the union category associations, and the cultural field. The roles in the dental boards were retrieved from the website of the National Medical and Dental Committee from 2018 to 2022; the roles in the union category associations at the provincial, regional, and national levels were retrieved from the related web pages, considering the period from 2018 to 2021; and the information about the speakers at national conferences from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2021 was retrieved from the National Agency for Regional Health Services (Agenzia nazionale per i servizi sanitari regionali (AGENAS)) websites. The extracted data were grouped and examined using descriptive statistics (frequency), and due to the categorical nature of the data, non-parametric tests (chi-square tests) were used to assess any differences between the two genders. The null hypothesis was that there were no statistical differences between the two genders’ distributions. A p-value was considered significant when <0.05. In addition, aiming to understand the representation of male and female dentists, a comparison of the distributions of males and females in the dental boards with the percentages of female and male dentists operating in Italy in 2021 was performed using a binomial test. The analysis of the data regarding the composition of the dental boards and of the union category association boards revealed a statistically significant difference in the distribution of the roles between the two genders at the regional and local levels, with a p-value of <0.05, and a significantly low representation of the women practicing dentistry (p < 0.05). In Italy, women practicing dentistry are underrepresented in dental organizations and in cultural events, given the low numbers of female dentists in leadership and/or speaker roles in the years 2018–2021. Even though the glass ceiling effect continues to affect Italian female dentists, initiatives and political measures have been taken to improve this condition and reach gender equity. MDPI 2023-03-11 /pmc/articles/PMC10048370/ /pubmed/36981485 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060828 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Bernardi, Sara Fulgenzi, Maria Bruna Rovera, Angela Rinaldi, Fabiola Trichilo, Sara Bianchi, Serena Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation |
title | Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation |
title_full | Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation |
title_fullStr | Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation |
title_full_unstemmed | Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation |
title_short | Dentistry and Gender Gap: An Overview of the Italian Situation |
title_sort | dentistry and gender gap: an overview of the italian situation |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10048370/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36981485 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060828 |
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