media (7).
Dental auxiliaries worldwide are predominantly female (6,8). Approximately 96.5% of European dental auxiliaries are female (6). Traditionally, women are believed to be more caring and compassionate and this supposedly makes jobs such as dental auxiliary more suited to them (6,7). Indeed, it has been argued that men and women have different traits that make them suitable only for particular types of job (6). To date, the dental nursing profession in the public service in Malaysia has been restricted to women (9). Ironically, this gender restriction is only applicable to dental nursing training. There are no such gender restrictions on applications to enter other health allied science training such as for dental technologists, dental surgery assistants, medical assistants and medical nurses