Changing the Narrative

By Josey Sewell

A great relationship is about two things:

1. Appreciating the similarities, and 2. Respecting the differences.

We are all about girl power at my house. In fact, traditional gender roles cause significant confusion for my children (19, 12, and 8 years old). My husband is a stay-at-home Dad, and I’m the breadwinner of our family. My 8-yearold has always known Dad to be at home and the one that handles homework, soccer practice, cooking, cleaning, and shopping. The other night before bed during our nightly snuggle fest he said to me, “Mom, why do people always talk about ‘Mom’s cooking’? Moms don’t cook, Dads cook!” My family is proof that we can change the future by changing the narrative our children hear.

Over 90% of dental team members are female and 50.6% of graduating dentists are female. However, less than 10% of executives in dental groups and DSOs are female. Research tells us that when women are part of leadership teams, the culture and profitability of a company improves significantly. So why aren’t more women in executive leadership roles? The answer is complicated, and deserves the industry’s attention.

I’ve had more experiences than I can count when I was the only woman in the room. I’ve been blessed to work with men who treated me as an equal partner, respected my opinion, and honored who I was. I’ve also had many occasions when my opinion was disregarded, my ideas stolen, and my kindness taken advantage of. More than once I was promised things like shares or ownership in a company, only to find myself the recipient of empty promises. That’s why I risked starting my own company in the middle of a pandemic.

We have to educate our male counterparts on what it means to work with women in positions of leadership, and help them embrace the differences in leadership styles as strengths. Women don’t need to act more like men to lead. They need to lead in a way only women know how – through nurturing and supporting others.

Yet, the greater struggle we have in securing women in leadership is the way women treat other women. If you ask any woman despite their title, background, education, or position they can all share stories when they have been hurt by other women. I’ve witnessed firsthand social media “influencers” who claim to support other women distinctly tear down and destroy other women in person. We can do better.

If equality was an easy fix, it would’ve happened already. The most important thing we can do is to educate ourselves, seek first to understand then to be understood, and find ways to intentionally make choices that might feel uncomfortable because we’ve never done it before. My challenge to you is to expand your thinking and your decisions to bring in people who are different from you and enjoy the process of learning something new.

We are in the most exciting and transformative time in dentistry. The decisions we make today will cause a ripple effect into the future. May we all choose to be more kind, more inclusive and more thoughtful about the people we surround ourselves with and trust to lead our teams and companies.

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