Twitter is not an equalizer in healthcare research, according to new research out of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the research examines a pool of roughly 1,000 health services researchers who spoke at AcademyHealth's 2018 Annual Research Meeting and were active on Twitter. It examines accounts followed, tweets per year, likes and retweets.
The study showed female researchers, even with similar follow counts and tweets per year, had roughly half as many followers as their male counterparts. Tweets by the female researchers generated 45 percent fewer likes and 48 percent fewer retweets on average.
The disparity was less prominent among younger researchers, which study authors hypothesize may reflect shifting gender differences among millennials compared to older generations.
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