A Check Up of Gender Diversity at U.S. Dental Schools

In the 2009-10 academic year, approximately 20,000 students were enrolled in U.S. dental schools. About 45 percent of them were women. This is huge progress. Thirty years ago, women were less than one quarter of all dental school students. Today, about one in five practicing dentists are women. But due to the tremendous progress of women in dental education, undoubtedly the gender gap in the dental profession will narrow considerably in the years ahead.

If we break down national enrollments figures to see how women are doing at particular dental schools, we see major differences. At Harvard Dental School, women make up a whopping 63.5 percent of the total enrollments. This is a far higher percentage of women enrollments than any other dental school in the nation. As the table below shows, there are only nine other dental schools in the United States where women make up more than half of the total enrollments.

There are 13 dental schools nationwide where women are less than 40 percent of the total enrollments. At the University of Oklahoma, Loma Linda University, and Oregon Health & Science University, women are less than one third of the total enrollments.