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In May Alison Murray and I went to St Petersburg to present a day of orthodontic teaching to Russian delegates. We were somewhat surprised to see that, within an audience of 52 orthodontists, only three delegates were male. This reflected a previous experience behind the ‘erstwhile’ Iron Curtain, when David DiBiase and I travelled to Warsaw in 1991 to give the first ever fixed appliance course in Poland. At that time, all of the attendees on our 3-day course were female, as we were told that orthodontics was not a specialty that was practised by ‘real men’ in Poland. Evidently not much has changed in the intervening quarter century.
Last week I returned from the 30th British Orthodontic Conference held at the superb conference centre in Central Manchester. The British Orthodontic Society was formed some 23 years ago, following the merging of five completely disparate groups of orthodontists, under this newly formed umbrella of the BOS. At that time it was almost exclusively led by middle-aged men. I had the opportunity in Manchester to attend the ‘Group Chairs’ meeting and I am delighted to tell you that the five group Chairpersons and the President of the BOS are all incredibly talented and hardworking female colleagues. And at the Prize-giving session of the BOS, out of the 17 prizes awarded, only one went to a male orthodontist. Our specialty is currently being led by many capable females, the society is most certainly in excellent hands and the future is looking extremely bright.
In the UK, there truly is a ‘feminization of the orthodontic workforce’ going on, which perhaps follows this trend set up previously in Eastern Europe. Murphy et al reported on this phenomenon back in 2006 as, 11 years ago, 66% of the trainees in the country were female, and it could be even higher today.1 If, as is sometimes alluded to in workforce studies, the output of female workers is going to be significantly lower than their male counterparts, ‘manpower’ planners will need to take this into consideration when planning allocation of resources and the workforce required to meet the country's future needs. I'm not at all sure that the current workforce planners are aware of this trend, as there are apparently moves to reduce the number of orthodontic training places. We need to be ready and able to produce robust data and counterarguments to support our cause, in the days to come.