Women's Health Collective; Interview with Dr. Barbara McGayhee

[piano intro] this is mecca carpenter from the Columbia women's health collective our guest today is dr barbara McGayhee will be speaking about her experiences as a woman dentist as part of our series women in the health related professions why dont we start out barbara by your telling us how you got involved or interested in being a dentist since that's pretty rare for a woman great thats um thats something i've been asked quite

um when i was probably my mother switched um dentist for us and took us to a younger dentist who employed um a hygenist and several assistants and had a fairly modern office and i went in there and had a really good time there felt very comfortable with the services that they provided and the way in which they provided and i talked quite a bit with the hygiene and so within the dense at that hygienist and with the dentist at the time thought you know this is a profession that i think i would really enjoy theres a fare amount of teaching and dealing with motivating as doing um something technical that you can see a product more or less you can see an improvement um you do something that you enjoy see what happens and i decided then that was the

profession that I wanted to be involved with and then in high school decided that id be a dental hygenist more acceptable role in that profession and then um i started dental hygiene school out of out of high school and out of high school and decided right away that yes i still like dentistry but i thought that i wanted to go a little farther with it so i decided then that i wanted to be a dentist what was that transition point how are you able to make it when most dental hygenists are not able to for one thing i think its the mindset like it i was set on on the profession it wasnt something that a guidance counselor said hey this would be a goods would be a good profession for you to do profession for you to do i was really interested in dentistry able to take that a step farther and say hey i got the capabilities much more than the limitations that this role would have

have for me and why shouldnt I of course making that decision was easy part what came afterwards was the hard part which is most of my classmates saying things like oh my goodness i wouldnt want that responsibility or um oh no thats that would be too time consuming consuming for me or too stressful a number of other were quite surprised but i this was about the middle of my first year and I this is fine i think this will be good background but im going to go on something else i want to do here so you basically just left after one year oh no i finished the program at the time it was I thought logically logically i should finish there was alot that i would learn that um then when i went on and did my two years to get a bachelors degree that i could work

part time certainly id still be working in the profession i'd see things i'd learn things um i couldnt see any reason really you know not to do it because at the same time i was taking the dental hygiene courses i was able to go ahead and get an associates degree so i didnt lose time in terms of academic hours or so it seemed like a reasonable thing to do so i finished it and then what happend in dental school was that difficult? um i thought that there would be more of a difficulty with just i figured there would be the old jokes in the anatomy lab and you know just general ill feelings about having women in the class but really wasn't prepared for the fact that the the faculty had many of those quote ideas about you know women in the dental profession really than even my classmates did being my

my age yes it was difficult there were there were a number of instances when they really promoted mental harassment of female dental student maybe that was unknowingly but they did make it difficult and thats thats ultimately going to change their you know roughly ten percent of physicians in this country are women and less than two percent of the dentists are women and this profession is not as old as medicine how many how many women were there in your class there were six in the class of sixty quite a jump um mine was the fourth class to graduate from a new dental school and the first class had one one woman and the second class had one woman and the third had two and then they really though they had increased things greatly when my class class came along and uh they were content with that they now have probably the thirteen to fifteen

women in a class that size or perhaps a larger size well by the number of women in the class but i think that by increasing the number the whole education process so much easier for everyone because being a minority really makes you stand out and many other women because there are so few are more reluctant to stand together for a principle or were reluctant to extend themselves and do things that were not expected of them for fear of being too much in more out to get criticism for it so i really feel like if they could see their way to um

not considering women the number of women in class as being invasive if it gets near 25 percent that really things will improve quite a bit well how did you find setting a practice up were you able to sort of use the old boys system that is practicing dentist in town have they been helpful to you or or you pretty much on your own and is it any different because you're a woman it is different definitely being a woman i can give as an example not long ago I was speaking with that a young dentist who graduated from dental school a couple years before me came to columbia to set up and he he was able to make contact with an older dentist who was getting ready retire and the man could really relate to him as you know like his son

who had never followed in his footsteps and gone and profession this fella came along there was a real camaraderie and he he was very helpful to dentist getting set up and i feel that that's the kind of thing a woman dentist and being the only woman dentist that i really would lack that kind of help or just feeling that of heres the nice lets help her out i think theres there are alot of things that are uncomfortable for established male professionals in a community when a lone female comes to one of the other reasons i think things are

are more do it on your own now is that in recent years years like in the past ten years the enrollment in dental schools has increased tremendously and that was due to health man power indicated there was going to be this much need for dentists too many dentists in some of the small towns columbia certaintly i mean in missouri that certainly too many dentists in the larger cities and that goes so it's it's just more difficult period going someplace and starting a dental practice and in it is moreso in many of the other health professions because of costs of starting a practice there are very high supply and equipment costs in

a chance often to start out on your own without some kind of help some kind reinforcement from other people in the community refer to your see that your name gets circulated i think that that's why that's really changed many many dentists in certain locations and its starting to get fairly competitive so basically you just had to borrow the money and well ive done something that I I became aware of was a trend in in dentistry and i'm sure that in a way in many of the other health professions that that of leasing office space from someone who's established and actually beginning your own practice but leasing their space

use their equipment and many of the other things that you know that you would need to practice and the dentist that i lease space from works a regular work week 8 to 5 and i start working in the evenings from 5 to 10 three evenings a week and then and all day saturday so im utilizing space that he wouldn't probably under any circumstances utilize and it's it's for me because there arent those initial cost for practice when youre new in a place and youre not well known and its going to be you know six eight ten months before producing enough to pay your overhead costs now one of the reasons a-lot of young professionals out of school are real reluctant because if they're going to place where theyre needed you know right now thats different but if theyre going to someplace theyd like to live

and settle down and there already to happen to be alot of professionals then actually getting establishes is going to take a lot longer longer and require more funds would you consider going practicing in some place fairly rural or that doesnt grab you um in some respects it does i would like to live more in a country setting than in a city but it's kind of tricky determining where that place would be and also having the access to at least a city the size of columbia if not larger and i mean an access within a couple of hours and certainly ive considered alot more out there there isn't any place in missouri that ive particularly thought of doing that thought there are a number who get established in a city such as the size of Columbia and offices im not quite sure how positive i feel about

because you cant be two places at once theres got to be some difficulties there but um i certainly certainly thought of that i wouldnt be opposed to it I live outside of columbia now only ten or fifteen minutes certainly i could live farther away but the immediate areas around columbia have are pretty well taken care of as well for the reason i stayed there are alot of dentists that have satelitte offices and people don't really have to travel travel very far to see a dentist in this particular area im sure its different southern missouri how do you find that you related patients after they get over their initial surprise i mean do you think being a woman has some assets? oh i definitely do i think i probably wouldn't have felt strongly about actually achieving a role

that wouldnt in many people minds be um their their mental set about what an i think if i hadn't felt that after people got over that you know that initial discomfort that they really appreciated the fact that they were being cared for by a woman that they for whatever reason that a woman would be more a gentle with um a little more understanding a little more understanding i think think that i see alot of those different kinds of perceptions with with people when they come in but ive ive found them to be very receptive

one of the strongest stereotypes that people have about a a woman being a dentist is the feeling that goodness will she be strong enough to extract a tooth and that really stems from there's so much more involved in dentistry so much fine motor coordination so many fine techniques but in people's people's minds a dentist is still primarily one who certainly part of the problem i you know i do i do extract teeth but its not a um problem of strength its a matter of leverage so strength doesnt have to much to do with it you know possibly being shorter or very short you know might might might be a problem but you can always compensate for that by how you hats who are the sex

certainly it has the sex of the dentist doesnt really affect the work thats provided as far as i'm concerned thats an individual thing i realize that its a gross generalization to say that women would be kinder um gentler um inflict less pain it just simply isnt going to be true you know in all cases it may be in some um thats great if that exists thats real fine but um im not absolutely sure of some of the other reasons why people are glad to be going to a woman basically seem to appreciate it

for some of them its that such a different feeling perhaps to be talking to a woman dentist than a male dentist maybe they listen a little better they become a little more motivated they do some of the things for whatever reason they didn't do before and then theyre happier with themselves and their dental health and so then dentists well thank you very much barbara. Our guest today has been dr. barbara McGayhee speaking about her experiences as a dentist as part of our series in women in the health related professions [Music] [Music]