#WomenWhoCurie: Leveraging Social Media to Promote Women in Radiation Oncology

Abstract

The proportion of female trainees in radiation oncology has generally declined despite increasing numbers of female medical students; as a result, radiation oncology is among the bottom 5 specialties in terms of the percentage of female applicants. Recently, social media has been harnessed as a tool to bring recognition to underrepresented groups within medicine and other fields. Inspired by the wide-reaching social media campaign of #ILookLikeASurgeon to promote female physicians, members of the Society for Women in Radiation Oncology penned a new hashtag and launched the #WomenWhoCurie social media campaign on Marie Curie's birthday November 7th, as part of their strategy to raise public awareness. From November 6, 2018 until November 10, 2018, the #WomenWhoCurie hashtag delivered 1,135,000 impressions, including 408 photos from all over the world including United States, Spain, Canada, France, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, India, Ecuador, Panama, Brazil, and Nigeria. Alongside continued gender disparity research, social media should continue to be used as a tool to engage the community and spur conversations to formulate solutions for gender inequity.

Fig. 1

Participation in the #WomenWhoCurie campaign across the United States. States with participation are shown in blue, with darker shades of blue representing a higher number of total tweets. Location is based on Twitter profile information.

Fig. 2

Participation in the #WomenWhoCurie campaign across the world. Countries with participation are shown in blue, with darker shades of blue representing a higher number of total tweets. Location is based on Twitter profile information.

Fig. 3

Sentiment word frequency for #WomenWhoCurie. The sentiment analysis was created using Symplur Signals, which is powered by a natural language processing algorithm that extracts the polarity of healthcare conversations on Twitter.

Fig. 4

Network analysis of the #WomenWhoCurie hashtag campaign. This network analysis graph depicts conversation and mention patterns between the most central Twitter users of the #WomenWhoCurie campaign in November 2018. The circles represent each Twitter user who participated. The larger the circle, the more influential the user in the campaign. The lines connecting these circles represent the communications between the individuals, with the thickness of the line representing the frequency of communication.

Fig. 5

Dr. Anna Lee, PGY-5 Radiation Oncology Resident, SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

Fig. 6

Dr. Ashley Albert, PGY-4 Radiation Oncology Resident, University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Fig. 7

University of Cincinnati Department of Radiation Oncology.

Fig. 8

Medical College of Wisconsin Department of Radiation Oncology.