Viral meme re-creating New Yorker cover started with Wisconsin surgeon
Look, here we are.
That’s what female surgeons are telling us in a viral cascade of photos from the perspective of a patient looking up from an operating table.
The online sensation was started this month by an endocrine surgeon from Madison named Susan Pitt. She is an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Like many in her profession, she loved the cover of The New Yorker magazine on April 3. It was artwork by Malika Favre showing four surgeons, all female, hovering over an unseen patient.
Pitt saw an opportunity to present real-life surgeons, also women, in a re-creation of the cover art. She happened to be at a conference of endocrine surgeons in Orlando, Fla., so she asked three fellow doctors to pose with her.
There was no operating room handy, so the hotel lobby would have to do. They leaned over an iPhone on a coffee table and got the image they wanted. In early April, Pitts posted the photo on Twitter alongside The New Yorker image and asked others to do the same.
“The initial challenge was more to get solidarity among female surgeons and show that, look, we’re out here and there’s a lot of us,” she told me. “There’s also a lot of bias among the public. We’re frequently mistaken for nurses, not that it’s bad to be a nurse. It’s the thought that you’re a woman in a hospital, therefore you’re a nurse.”
But it’s more than that. Only about 19% of surgeons in the United States are women. These doctors are paid significantly less than their male counterparts, Pitt said, and there are fewer women in leadership positions. “There’s a reason why there’s a little girl standing in front of the bull down on Wall Street,” she said.
Pitt’s Twitter feed was flooded with photos of female surgeons in The New Yorker pose. They came from all over the United States and from countries including Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Kenya, Norway, Sweden, France, Scotland, Turkey, India, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
“For the peak days, there were about 2,000 tweets a day for three days in a row. That includes retweets,” Pitt said. “They’re still coming at like 20 and 30 a day.”
She helped spread the word by using an existing hashtag, #ILookLikeASurgeon and then going with a new tag, #NYerORCoverChallenge, and the tweets have received more than 100 million impressions, she said. Many more images appeared on Instagram and Facebook.
Pitt has thanked each group that posted, and she asked The New Yorker to write a story on the huge response and about equity issues for female surgeons. The Association of Women Surgeons has asked if she would get out in front to raise awareness, and she agreed.
One of the surgeons who joined Pitt for the photo in Orlando is Tracy Wang. She works in the Department of Surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin, which she praised for its strong record in the professional development of women in medicine. But she knows there are global gender gaps, which help explain the tremendous response to the photo.
Pitt, 39, grew up in Baltimore. She attended the Medical College of Wisconsin after her father, Henry Pitt, took a job there as chairman of the surgery department. In the past, she has received a couple hundred likes for popular Facebook posts, but has never gone viral like this.
“It’s a little surreal and kind of amazing, and who knew this would become so big,” she said.
The social media world is known for its haters, but Pitt says there has been refreshingly little negativity in response to her campaign. Some people have posted comical versions of the surgeons image, including the Simpsons, the Minions from “Despicable Me” and Lego figures.
When Pitt and the others posed for the photo that started it all, they didn’t have surgical masks handy.
“I love that our faces are there,” she said. “If you saw the picture on a poster or a billboard, you would never go, oh, those are four surgeons.”
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist. Jim.Stingl.