We accept that knowledge translation is critical to the practice of emergency medicine, yet when it comes to the practice of BEING an emergency physician, we do not always practice evidence based medicine. Once we realized that the experiences of many female emergency physicians were similar but not shared, we felt the need to create an open access resource to address that issue.
FemInEM was born out of the real but unfortunate truth that the gender pay gap is alive and well and promotion of women through the academic pipeline is slow. Malignant behavior runs rampant within medical training and women experience unconscious bias at all levels of development. In addition, numerous studies have shown that women carry more of the “care-based” workload, regardless of employment status, compounding the work-life conflict felt by all working professionals.
We will share the journey of how FemInEM began as a blog, but evolved quickly into a centralized resource for women needing advocates and champions. We will tell stories of how we are helping to change the conversation related to gender and equity in EM by highlighting the successful practices and programs supporting gender equity in an open access format. By using the principles of FOAM and the power of social media, we are trying to move the needle on gender and medicine in a way that hasn’t been done before.
