Faculty refocuses efforts on diversity, inclusivity, collegiality and equality

By Diane Peters

This fall, along with pandemic safety concerns, society in general and dentistry specifically will be thinking about race and diversity, and how to address issues such as systemic racism.

As a result, dean Daniel Haas has created a working group committee on diversity, inclusivity, collegiality and equality (DICE). It’ll be a redirection of the DICE committee that began in 2015 and issued a report in 2017, and will be headed up by the same Faculty members.

"Everyone involved in these efforts agrees we should open up how we look at diversity"

“I think this last year, with everything that’s gone on in the U.S., this is bringing this committee back to the forefront for the dean,” says Ernest Lam, Faculty professor and associate dean of graduate education, who will be co-chairing the group along with associate professor Laura Dempster.

Lam agreed to be part of the new working group committee as he’s been thinking about race, gender and general diversity in the profession for years — he wrote his first editorial on the subject for the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association back in 2013.

Dempster says issues around equality are “globally timely. It would be remiss of any health professional group or anyone whatsoever to ignore it and just continue with the status quo.”

As a long-time advocate of expanding dental education to include a wider range of skills, Dempster wonders if conversations around race and gender equality, for instance, should be more a part of the curriculum, especially since social inequities influence access to care, and overall health. “We need to keep our minds open about what it means to train dentists,” she says.

Today’s dental school cohorts look very different than in the past, with more women and people from a wide range of backgrounds. However, Lam says there’s still a worrisome lack of representation of women and people of colour in high-ranking roles in the profession.

“In every organization, I look at who are the leaders and I want to see whether I’m reflected in those leaders. And if I see I’m not, I have to ask myself why am I a member of this organization?” he says. “Why aren’t leadership opportunities being made to women or people of colour?”

While it’s still too early to summarize what the working group committee plans to undertake, Lam thinks the team will likely look to the 2017 DICE committee report.

A key recommendation of that report suggested that the Faculty survey students, staff, faculty and patients about diversity. Lam says there’s not nearly enough data about the profession and diversity, beyond gender. “I like to be evidence based,” he says.

Fortunately, plans are already underway to conduct a diversity survey this fall of incoming students. Associate professor Jim Yuan Lai, vice-dean of education, has been working on this for months, as part of a strategic plan working group. “We need to understand ourselves,” he says.

Lai got input from the faculty of law at UofT to develop the survey, which will ask students to supply self-identifying information, which may include sexual identity and being a person of colour. (The survey has not been fully drafted yet.)

Everyone involved in these efforts at the Faculty this year agrees we should open up how we look at diversity. “There are so many different definitions of diversity,” says Lai, says being a single parent, or being the first person in a family to attend university could be important indicators.

“I see diversity as more than just discrete points on a line,” says Lam, who notes that diversity is a spectrum, and a person can occupy multiple positions along the spectrum, such as being in two or more types of so-called marginalized groups. As a result, diversity needs to take into account everything from race to disability to age. Meanwhile, microaggressions and systemic inequities may be just as powerful as outright discrimination.

Data, a wider scope and lots of curiosity will be driving these efforts at the faculty this fall. Stay tuned for more on this important and emerging work.

Photo: Students at U of T building