Giving Tuesday and WIMS
Authors: Avital O’Glasser, MD; Shikha Jain, MD
Keywords: women in medicine, non-profit, #GivingTuesday, leadership, professional development
Tomorrow, November 30th, is #GivingTuesday. Positioned immediately after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday was created in 2012 to be “a day that encourages people to do good”. Now commemorating its tenth anniversary, Giving Tuesday has expanded into a global movement to inspire and harness the power and potential of radical generosity (especially after days of indulgence and shopping).
This Giving Tuesday, we ask that you consider adding Women in Medicine ® (“WIM”) to the list of beneficiaries of your generosity.
Why donate to WIM? WIM is an organization dedicated to educating and empowering women in medicine and engaging males allies to combat and eliminate the gender gap.
WIM is also a state recognized non-profit organization that has launched a remarkable breadth and depth of programming to educate, inform, and impart skills to women in healthcare. The inequitable gender gap remains pervasive throughout society, and the professional American healthcare system is no expectation. Now more than ever, as we approach the two year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic, women in practice, women in training, and women in the pipeline need ongoing opportunities to be empowered and to engage allies. WIMS has also provided a very special focal point around which women, and their allies, have connected, collaborated, and supported each other.
The Women in Medicine Summit may be a singular event, but it is not the solo event in the WIM catalogue of programs. WIM has expanded its reach, impact, and foundational work throughout the annual cycle through its recurring lecture series and longitudinal initiatives such as the Leadership Primer for early career faculty, the Leadership Accelerator for mid-career faculty, and the Inclusive Leadership Development Lab and other HeforShe initiatives for male allies, medical student programming, and a research lab..
Further accelerating means to tell our stories and amplify our voices, 2021 also saw the launch of the WIMS Blog and WIMS Speakers Bureau.
Today’s post also marks the 20th post for the WIMs Blog! The early origins of the blog harken back to late Winter 2021. The blog went live in July, with our stated goals of expanding #womeninmedicine content applicable to our professional communities and to authors an opportunity to express their diverse and unique voices. As Dr. Jain tweeted, “Often the voices we need to hear are the ones that are silenced. We want to work to change that.” Through these 20 posts, we have helped amplify the voice of women from across our community, from trainees to women in practice. Themes have spanned the arc of gender bias and inequity, intersectionality, professional development, racism, and DEI. We featured multiple posts inspired by the September WIMS conference (“Evolution of Empowerment”). We continue to build community, especially but not only through the WIMS social media channels, finding and encouraging new voices to submit their work. In the coming weeks, we look forward to amplifying impactful voices on the topics of climate change, women's history, women's health, and professional development.
Any amount of discretionary support for Women in Medicine ® enables strategic investments in the most promising initiatives, including new educational content, convenings, and leadership training. General funds also support important technology developments and applications in low-resource settings.
So, on #GivingTuesday 2021, please donate to WIMS.
About the authors: Avital O’Glasser, MD, is a hospitalist at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and the medical director of OHSU’s Preoperative Medicine Clinic. She is a founding member of the Advancing Vitae and Novel Contributions for Everyone (ADVANCE) group, which works to promote gender equity through CVs and other professional documents, and she is the inaugural editor of the WIMS blog (Twitter: @aoglasser).
Shikha Jain, MD, is an oncologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the founder of the Women in Medicine Summit (Twitter: @ShikhaJainMD);
