Interview with Clark Yoder, History 150 Spring 2020, Conducted by Amelia Yoder, March 21, 2020.

Biography:

I interviewed my father, Clark Yoder.  Clark lives in Fairfield, CT and is father to three daughters. He grew up in Chadds Ford, PA with four older sisters. Chadds Ford is a small rural town in Southeastern Pennsylvania. The area is known for mushroom farms, horse breeding and other agricultural businesses. Clark’s grandparents were Mennonites and his father was one of 13 children. As Clark had a fairly large immediate family and an extremely large extended family he was exposed to many  people with different jobs and careers.

Clark was fortunate that he was able to travel with his father each summer all over the world.  His father was self employed and installed communication towers for the US government.  These jobs took them to travel to many  countries and territories including Japan, Guam American Samoa, Western Samoa and Okinawa.

Clark attended Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT and graduated in 1990. His radiology career began at Greenwich Hospital in 1990 where he served as a special procedures x-ray technologist. Four jobs later, Clark graduated from the University of Connecticut with his MBA in 2008. From the start of his career, he has assumed multiple leadership roles. He has over 25 years of senior healthcare leadership and began serving as the chief executive officer of radiology company, Advanced Radiology in 2015 with multiple locations throughout Connecticut.

In this interview, Clark will not only speak about his career, but also speak to gender in the management and healthcare social change that he has observed throughout his professional career.

Research:

1. My father began working in radiology and healthcare in the 1990’s. A report on NPR studied the popularity of college majors from the 1970’s to 2010, and found that healthcare is steadily growing. In 1990 there were 60,000 health profession graduates, which NPR states that the field is projected to add more jobs in the upcoming decade as of 2014. In addition, NPR stated that “the health care sector added jobs month after month,” which speaks to what my Dad said as there have been many advancements in radiology since the start of my father’s career, supporting the prediction that the health care sector will continue to grow.

Bui, Quoctrung. “What’s Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph.” NPR, NPR, 9 May 2014, www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph.

2. When my father began working in healthcare it was predominately female oriented, which is confirmed by an article published by the Harvard Business Review, “The Entry-Level Health Care Jobs Men Are (and Are Not) Taking.” It was noted that men were reluctant “…to take jobs that require tasks that are associated with femaleness,” Though there are many aspects to healthcare, the article identifies that there are relatively new occupations “where the work is less feminized and less stigmatized, and where there has been an increase in male workers,” like radiology, which was where my father started. The percentage of men in this field that can be considered“entry-level allied health workers” is still small but is continuing to rise in a heavily female-dominated field, and that “white men who are able to gain additional training, may be defining some health care occupations as more technical and masculine,” which supports the idea that my father may have been considered a minority at one time, but even goes further to prove that anyone can work in healthcare.

Dill, Janette. “The Entry-Level Health Care Jobs Men Are (and Are Not) Taking.” Harvard Business Review, 24 Feb. 2017, hbr.org/2017/02/the-entry-level-health-care-jobs-men-are-and-are-not-taking.

3. I believe careers in healthcare is on the rise, as it is growing in popularity among college students, and is growing as an industry overall. However, I was curious to know more about the management and business side to healthcare. As of 2018, women made up 46.9% of the US labor force, but “only slightly over a third of managers in 2018.” In general, though the number is small in comparison to men regarding management, researchers found that “women made up the highest share of managers in …medical and health services (72.0%)” but the higher the corporate ladder, the less women there were. This demonstrates the inequality that still exists in corporate America today.

“Female Business Leaders: Global Statistics.” Catalyst, 7 Aug. 2019, www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-management/.

Interview Transcription:

Amelia Yoder:  I’m here with my father Clark Yoder. Do you consent to be recorded and shared with the class?

Clark Yoder:  Yes, I do.

AY:  Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself?

CY:  Sure. I am 53 years old. I have three daughters, and I live in Fairfield, Connecticut. And I’ve worked in healthcare for my whole career since I graduated college in 1990. So, I’ve been actively involved in variety things in in healthcare on the management side of things, but I also worked in, as a technologist, a radiology technologist, for the first part of my career. And right now, we’re in the midst of the coronavirus and so I’m dealing a lot with that at work at this point in time.

AY:  Very, that’s true. So, you grew up in Pennsylvania and you are the youngest of four sisters. Can you tell me what that was like growing up?

CY:  Sure. So, I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, it’s, it’s southeastern Pennsylvania. It’s about one hour outside of Philadelphia. And initially, from what I remember growing up, we lived on an old farmhouse. And I have four older sisters, like you said, and in the oldest sister, we are far apart in age. So, we’re about 16 years difference in age between my oldest sister myself, so there’s quite a big difference. And so growing up with them, it was interesting because as my older sisters were older, two sisters, I don’t remember a lot of them, because by the time I could start to remember things at seven, eight years old, six, seven, eight years old, they were already moved out of the house. So, it was rather interesting. So, we basically had I was close with my two younger sisters and my two older sisters not so much because we were just so different and had completely different interests as being the only boy, I did things that they had no interest in. And so, we were very different and we almost in a way lead different lives.

AY:  Um, though you guys had a really big age gap, how do you feel they’ve shaped you or influenced you into the person you are now?

CY:  Well, I think they shaped me because they were at a variety different maturity levels. And so having two much older sisters, by the time that I was in, let’s say elementary to middle school, they were already starting to have kids and so it it allowed me to I think become mature earlier and just become more aware of their lives and the things that they were going through. I got to experience I think a lot of different things in my life which contributed to me I think maturing earlier and just being a little bit self-aware of what they were doing and what their lives were about.

AY:  Um, in regard to growing up together, did you guys have the same expectations regarding chores for those who were in the house at the same time?

CY:  No, not at all. So just because that they were older, they did more chores, and I didn’t have to, cuz I was the young one and certainly being the youngest and the only boy certainly has advantages but as they grew up and moved out of the house, then the roles flipped that I had all the chores because most of my sisters were moved out into college and I was still home with my parents. So, I pretty much had all the chores. So, it flip flopped different parts of my life.

AY:  Um, and after you, your sisters are off to school and then you went off to school and you studied radiology.

CY:  Yes.

AY:  What did you, do you know, your sisters majored in?

CY:  Yeah. So, when the two sisters were teachers, one went to school to be a respiratory therapist and the other studied criminal law.

AY:  Interesting. So, from your own experience, can you make observations about how men or women were represented or treated in the workplace, just from what you’ve observed?

CY:  Well, being in healthcare, it’s, it’s certainly is predominantly female oriented. And so especially when I started it was much more females than males. So everything was, I was more the underrepresented. I don’t want to use the word minority, but I was I was the rarity with that. And so, women certainly had all the opportunities to advance in their career. But I think also being a man in a woman’s field allowed me to advance I think a little further and a little quicker than other people did. Because typically the the women that went into health care at the time, were all young. And since they were younger, they were starting to raise family or have kids raise, raise families, and so they became less I would say, goal, career oriented, versus I was the opposite. I just wanted to advance in my career, and that was the number one priority.

AY:  Have you noticed a shift over time and have seen more men in healthcare?

CY:  Yeah, I have. I think it’s it has it has shifted. It has grown. It hasn’t flipped to where there’s more men than women. But I think it has, I think there’s just been a slow progression in healthcare.

AY:  To kind of go back and elaborate on another point, do you feel that you ever had an advantage in healthcare because you were a male?

CY:  I think again, yeah, I had an advantage, I would say, just for the fact that, um, I was more long-term career oriented where I wanted to grow into management. And, and as I kind of said before, the the younger women in radiology or healthcare at the time, didn’t really have an interest in that, their interest is more aligned to settling down having kids and having to be able to work in healthcare afforded them a balance to be able to work weekends and off shifts and that was more their interest. So, it certainly gave me an advantage because there weren’t a lot of the candidates or people that had those goals to really grow into management.

AY:  So, when I was preparing for this interview, I did some research on the advancement of radiology and I read that there are many advancements quickly. Have you noticed any in the field from when you first began radiology in the 90s to where you are now and what are some of them?

CY:  Oh, yeah, it has grown leaps and bounds. A lot of its can be attributed just to computers and how computers have improved so much. So, so for example, I’m sure people have heard of a CAT scan, which takes can take pictures of your any part of your body. And one of the more common procedures is that you do a CAT scan of the brain. And when I first started that CAT scan would probably take about 20 minutes to do. And it was just a slow process to acquire the images. Today, it literally takes about 30 seconds. And so, the speed of being able to process images and acquire images has improved so much. So, with that being said, you can take more images, so you get better detail and really have better opportunities to diagnose people. Other one is we used to read, or the radiologist would read the images or the X rays on film, X ray film, and you would have to go in a dark room and develop the film. And you would hang up the films and then they would read it on light boxes. Today, everything is filmless. So, the doctors read it on computer workstations now. And so, they’re able to go through images much more quicker and much more rapidly and magnify images and do a bunch of interesting things that the computer lets them to do. So, it’s, it’s changed dramatically.

AY:  So as a CEO in healthcare and having a prominent female presence throughout your life from growing up with four sisters and raising three girls, do you have any concerns for them in the future, if they choose a career, pursue a career in healthcare or business?

CY:  No, I don’t have any concerns at all. I think there’s tremendous amount of opportunity in business and certainly in healthcare. Healthcare is constantly looking for leadership and people that are motivated and have people’s best interests at heart and healthcare. And there are numerous prominent CEOs that are female and business leaders across the country in hospitals and health systems and in private companies. I actually think now is probably the best opportunity then than ever has been. I think there’s a wide variety of jobs that can be there. It doesn’t necessarily and someone doesn’t have to have in depth healthcare experience to succeed in healthcare. And sometimes we look to hire people from other industries into healthcare because other industries do things better and differently than healthcare does. And you need creativity. So, it really doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. I think if you’re smart, have unique ideas, and are motivated, you can succeed anywhere.

AY:  Great. Well, thank you, dad for sitting down and talking with me. I appreciate it.

CY:  My pleasure. Good luck Amelia on your project.

 

Conclusion:

This interview was conducted in person. I did not have to edit the interview. The interview was conducted in my living room in Fairfield, CT. To record the interview, I used the Voice Memos application on my phone. There were no obstacles that occurred during the interview process, as I had originally planned to interview my father at home over spring break.

Overall, I think that the interview went well. If I could do it over, I would have added more questions and would have gone more in depth. Some of my father’s responses were not what I was expecting and so I found it to be difficult to go off script. For the most part, I think that the interview flowed and was natural as I think the original questions that I asked built off the previous one. In the end, I feel that the divergences were positive ones, as I was able to readjust my questions as the interview went, which allowed for better responses which benefitted the interview in its entirety.