By Kelly Wright and Louise P. King
In this day and age, there is no room for all-male panels, or “manels,” as they are commonly known.
Yet, a quick search of Twitter for #manels or #allmalepanel reveals it remains the norm, with picture after picture of them occurring in a wide array of scientific and medical disciplines. Some try to excuse the error with a woman moderator – a “mom-erator” doing the “housekeeping” of managing the presentations. This is just as bad, if not worse.
Recently, #MedTwitter was awash with pictures of medical professionals in bikinis as a unique and effective protest to a flawed, and now retracted, journal article.
Those posting objected to the methods used and implicit bias contained in a recently published article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery. The authors replicated the methods and conclusions of a prior 2014 study, which did not garner the same attention at the time.
In both studies, various authors from different branches of surgery created fake accounts on social media and then used Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) lists of residents to scrutinize their public profiles for evidence of “unprofessional” conduct. Each of these studies was presented at a national meeting.
But having men create fake accounts to then secretly monitor residents’ social media profiles for what they personally find objectionable is not scientifically rigorous, and itself represents unprofessional behavior.