Despite some individual concerns about the lack of tenure opportunities for women at the Dartmouth Medical School, the level of gender diversity matches national averages for medical schools in most criteria.
Of the 76 full professors with tenure at the Medical School, 15 are women. At 19.7 percent, this figure approximately matches the national percentage of associate and full professors who are women compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges. But the percentage still does not represent gender equality.
"I don't understand and I don't know why there are so few female M.D.s with full professor status," said one DMS faculty member who wished to remain anonymous. "Either the Medical School isn't retaining their outstanding female faculty or they are not promoting them and are keeping them in the system as assistant and associate professors.
"Somehow questions have to be asked and someone has to give a real answer to them rather than just brushing them under the rug," the faculty member said.
These concerns were echoed in a recent Liason Committee on Medical Education student self-study which determined that some students perceive a shortage of women faculty at the Medical School.
The LCMA executive report suggested that this perception may come from the lack of senior women faculty, considering junior women faculty often have little time to serve as role models for students.
Even so, many administrators and students at the school remain satisfied with the level of gender diversity and excited about the growing role of women in medicine.
"We are always searching for and trying to identify women and minorities, but when you look at the sort of data that we obtain, I wouldn't say I see a problem," special assistant to the President for institutional diversity and equity Ozzie Harris said.
Harris explained that the composition of the Medical School either matches or is slightly under the national availability of women candidates.
In basic sciences, the composition of the medical school is 23 percent female as compared to a national availability of 20 percent. In clinical sciences, the composition is 18 percent female and the availability is 19 percent.
The availability rating is an estimate of the percentage of the total number of eligible M.D.s who are women.
A common explanation for the disparity between the numbers of male and female doctors nationally is the historical lack of women pursuing medical degrees. This trend changed in the second half of the century as more and more women began to pursue medical degrees.
Currently half of the Dartmouth Medical School student body is female.
Because the number of women in medicine has been increasing over the past half century, some people claim that the gender diversity among senior faculty should not be expected to be equal, but may be in the next couple decades.
"I just see it almost as a destiny that this is going to happen because the number of women in the junior ranks is increasing and the quality of women recruited here is incredible," senior advising dean Joe O'Donnell said. "Unlike what Larry Summers says at Harvard, we have women teaching, doing clinical work and doing research that is all really cutting edge."
For medical students the amount and diversity of faculty exposure varies greatly among individuals, in different departments and on different degree tracks. This yields a variety of opinions about the level of gender diversity at the Medical School.
"There are fields that are still male-dominated like surgery, but in my case I've had just as many or more women," third-year medical student Brett Chevalier said.
"I don't have many complaints about being a woman here at Dartmouth, and to be honest I would be disappointed to see an article about [a gender diversity problem] come out because I don't think that is the case here," Chevalier said.
