Apr 23, 2017
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 always practice evidence-based medicine.
We realized that the experiences of many female emergency
physicians were similar but not shared, so we created an open
access resource to address that. 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 and
women still experience unconscious bias at all levels of
development. Malignant behavior runs rampant within medical
training, and women are disproportionately affected by this
reality. In addition, balancing work life and home life can pose
extra challenges, especially for women. Numerous studies have shown
even when working full time, women often carry more of the “care
based” workload for home and family, compounding the “work-life
conflict” felt by physicians regardless of gender.
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 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.