CDA Essentials 2017 • Volume 4 • Issue 7

23 Issue 7 | 2017 | I ssues and P eople Who is more likely to own a practice? The researchers found that a higher proportion of male dentists in Ontario are practice owners compared with female dentists. However, when other factors are accounted for, it becomes clear that gender on its own does not influence the likelihood of a dentist owning a practice. More important are the dentist’s age, preference for part-time work, confidence in business skills, and the perception that either they or their partner had made career concessions for family life. • Age: Dentists under age 60, particularly those under 39, were more likely to be owners than dentists older than 60. • Preference for part-time work: Dentists who valued the ability to work part-time (e.g., those who rated it the most enjoyable career aspect) were less likely to be practice owners. • Confidence in business skills: Dentists who reported a higher level of confidence in their business knowledge and skills were more likely to be practice owners. • Career concessions: Dentists who felt they had made career concessions for family life were significantly less likely to be practice owners than those who felt they had made no concessions. Dentists who felt their spouses had made career concessions to help the dentist’s career were more likely to be practice owners. Who works the most hours? On average, dentists who responded to the survey worked 36 hours a week. Women worked, on average, 2 fewer hours a week than men. According to the authors, training location and household and caregiving responsibilities accounted for these gender differences in weekly work hours. • Training location: Whether dentists were trained internationally or in Canada had a significant effect on work hours for women, but not for men. Canadian-trained female dentists worked significantly fewer hours than internationally trained female dentists, whereas male dentists worked similar hours, regardless of where they trained. Consider that in 2008, the majority of Canadian faculties of dentistry had more female graduates than male, and that in 2009, women accounted for 58% of dentists under the age of 30 but only 8% of dentists over age 60. As women enter the Canadian dental profession in greater numbers than ever before, what does this ongoing demographic shift mean for the profession? Two papers published in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association ( JCDA.ca) looked at the choices men and women make in how they practise dentistry. Specifically, researchers at the University of Toronto surveyed Ontario dentists to see whether personal, professional and sociodemographic character- istics were good predictors of dentists’ weekly work hours and the likelihood of practice ownership. Their analyses are based on survey responses from 867 dentists, in roughly equal numbers of men and women. According to the study’s authors, training location and household and caregiving responsibilities accounted for gender differences in weekly work hours.