ABSTRACT
Purpose: Women physicians do not advance in academic promotion or leadership at the same rate as their male counterparts. One factor contributing to academic promotion and advancement is the experience of serving in elected leadership positions. Although >400 women are running for political office in 2018, fewer than a handful are physicians and there has never been a woman physician elected to the Congress. Yet, little is known about women physicians who run for elected positions within their institutions, medical/professional societies, or government. This study sought to examine how women physicians experience elections using a cross-sectional survey of women physicians to gain insight into patterns of reported experiences and perceived barriers to elected leadership positions. Methods: A cross-sectional survey study of 1221 women physicians. Results: 43.8% (N=535) of women physicians ran for an elected office from high school through medical school graduation, in contrast to only 16.7% (N=204) after graduating from medical school. Only 8.5% of women physicians surveyed reported a boss or supervisor encouraged them to run for an elected position. Conclusion: Women physicians are less likely to run for elected positions and for those with previous election experience, the most common barriers cited were lack of institutional time and support, experience, and mentorship.
ABSTRACT
Background: To increase awareness, search for solutions, and drive change, disparity-related research needs to be strategically disseminated. This study aimed to quantify whether a social media strategy could: (1) amplify dissemination of gender equity-related articles and (2) collect proposed solutions to gender equity issues. Methods: In April 2018, eight published journal articles covering separate gender equity issues were presented in a 1-hour Twitter chat hosted by Physician's Weekly. Metrics data were collected before, during, and after the chat. During the chat, one question related to each article was tweeted at a time. Qualitative data were extracted from responses and evaluated for thematic content. Results: In the 16-hour period during and following the chat, we tallied 1500 tweets from 294 participants and 8.6 million impressions (potential views). The Altmetric Attention Score of each article increased (average, 126.5 points; range, 91-208 points). Within the respective journal, the Altmetric Rank of seven articles improved (range, 3 to ≥19), while the eighth maintained its #1 rank. The one article for which share and download data were available experienced a 729% increase in shares following prechat posts and another 113% bump after the chat, a 1667% increase overall (n = 45-795). Similarly, downloads, and presumably reads, increased 712% following prechat posts and another 47% bump after the chat, a 1093% increase overall (n = 394-4700). We tallied 181 potential solutions to the eight gender equity-related questions. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate that social media can be used strategically to increase the dissemination of research articles and collect solution-focused feedback.
