Data confirm female physicians are less likely to have verified Twitter accounts

Key takeaways:

• Social media verification can validate a physician’s status in their public-facing profile.
• Despite no significant differences in the numbers of followers or accounts they were following, 70.7% of the accounts studied belonged to men and 29.3% belonged to women.
• When the researchers studied accounts by location, they found that 65.4% were based in the United States and 34.5% were international.

Significantly fewer women physicians have verified Twitter accounts compared with their male counterparts — a disparity that “may have important implications” for their careers, researchers explained.

Healio reported on the results of the study when they were initially presented at the Women in Medicine Summit last year.

Deborah Rupert, PhD, MS, MA, an MD-PhD student in Stony Brook University’s Medical Scientist Training Program, and colleagues noted that the findings track with previous research. A contributing factor for the gender disparity could be the potential for human bias in Twitter’s verification process, which the researchers wrote “lacks transparency.”

“Social media has become part of a physician’s professional and public-facing profile,” they said. “Verification validates and boosts that status and may have important implications for patient engagement and academic promotion based on digital scholarship.”

For the cross-sectional study, the researchers analyzed a sample of Twitter-verified users and categorized the accounts by sex and location. They also looked at account metrics like follower and following size and the dates the accounts were created.

The researchers evaluated 779 physician-held verified accounts. Among the 757 accounts with the sex of the user confirmed, the researchers found that 70.7% were men and 29.3% were women.

They did not find significant differences in the number of accounts they were following or the number of followers between men and women, but they did find that men had 3.2-fold more mean followers per account followed (251.2 [1007.0] followers vs. 76.4 [251.3] followers), “but this difference was not statistically significant.” When they normalized the follower-to-following ratio to the time when accounts were active, however, men tended to acquire “significantly more mean new followers per person followed per day (0.09 [0.41] followers vs 0.04 [0.14] followers).”

The researchers were able to assess 712 accounts that confirmed user locations — 34.5% were international and 65.4% were U.S. based. Users in the U.S. had a significantly lower mean follower-to-following ratio, along with a lower mean number of follower accounts (P < .001) and accounts they were following (P = .006). International users were also found to have more mean new followers per person followed per day (P < .001).

The disparities in male and female physicians, the researchers wrote, could be attributed to women’s accounts failing to meet verification thresholds, like being in the top 0.05% follower or mention count by location. But the finding that international physicians had fewer verified accounts even with higher follower-to-following ratios “suggests that this is unlikely,” the researchers said.

“Twitter’s verification process lacks transparency, and verification requests are reviewed case by case to assess whether accounts are ‘prominently recognized,’ suggesting that human biases may be easily interjected, given that internal signals required for verification are not explicitly stated,” they concluded.