Association Report Advancement of Women in Dental Education: Trends and Strategies

Neidle devoted her presidential address to the sub-ject of women in dentistry and dental education. She traced the increase in women dental students from 1960, when they were, “as the expression goes, as scarce as hen’s teeth, ” to 1970, when women repre-sented 2 percent of entering classes, to 1984, when 25 percent of the total number of students were women.1 She also noted, over that period, “an ame-lioration of the traditionally hostile attitudes that [had] prevailed in dental schools—stereotypes that char-acterized women as emotional, undependable, dis-tracting, flighty, lacking in physical strength, unde-sirable because they are likely to get pregnant, somehow less capable than males of practicing den-tistry. ” However, Dr. Neidle focused most of he