FemInEM was launched during the golden age of FOAM—Free Open Access Medical Education. Using the power of social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—we organized and informed women and our allies in Emergency Medicine in ways not done before. We connected and disseminated articles quickly among folks across states and even countries to rapidly grow as a leading voice and community supporting women in our field.

Fast-forward to today; many of us have grown skeptical of these channels. Whether due to misinformation, data privacy concerns, or the increasing prevalence of bots and curated content, relying solely on social media for communication can feel unreliable—even within communities  you used to trust.  

OG Twitter offered a sense of immediacy and direct engagement, allowing us to share genuine moments and personal updates without heavy layers of algorithmic interference. While not perfect, these platforms felt like a level playing field where anyone could share their voice, and organic, real-life connections flourished. But tech bros with egos only outmatched by their wealth have broken the system, and now most of us are gone from Twitter; we rarely use Facebook, and Instagram has been relegated to pictures and 90-second thoughts. TikTok, a platform that flourished when FemInEM was on hiatus, is about to be removed from US app stores, and Bluesky, the decentralized platform many of us have landed on, still does not unite people like OG Twitter did.

As we embark on the launch of FemInEM 2.0, I am pondering a crucial question: How do we, as a community, navigate and thrive in this new digital communication ecosystem? 

We will use our own platforms, such as our website and newsletter, to highlight our work.

These platforms have been carefully curated and designed to provide you with the most relevant and reliable information. 

Our website will continue to be the cornerstone of our work. We've slowly been building the user experience of the new site by adding pages and content that is most relevant to our community. Building the kind of site that will keep us focused, organized, and informed will take time and is a deeply engaged and rewarding process- so consider bookmarking the homepage and checking it out every so often. We launched in January with a basic product, a website that told you who we were and what we wanted to do, but now it is time to do it.  

Our newsletter will be a key tool for us to engage with you. We will use it to highlight new posts, articles, and content we want you to read. We will cross-post content on social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook, but we won't necessarily rely on those digital platforms for information dissemination. Instead, we will host the articles and content on our website and drive people to it (or to other trusted websites) to reinforce primary sourcing and its importance in this digital communication era. 

We'll also use our newsletter to ask you to engage with us. We will launch research studies with opportunities to be a participant or to join the team. When we want to accumulate new resources for workplace policies supporting women in medicine, we will ask you to share what you have seen work well. When we have resources to share, we will update our newsletter to highlight where they live on our website.

We will gather in person and online as often as possible.

We will prioritize gathering as often as possible. This may mean sessions at residency programs to discuss best practices for reproductive healthcare in your state or FemInEM-hosted meetings at national conferences to discuss our experiences as women in emergency medicine. And, of course, we will begin to plan our own conferences again. We are still in the early stages of planning, but it looks like we will be organizing a conference in Chicago—save the date—September 18-20, 2025.

We will also be using encrypted platforms like Signal to curate protected chats so that we can have real-time conversations safely. We will still post and facilitate conversations on traditional platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, but digital security is important, and we understand that public platforms may not be the right place for certain conversations about our work or how we treat the patients we see.  

We will grow our committees -- so please join one. These groups will work on policies to improve our workplaces or share state-based reproductive healthcare practices that serve our patients in these uncertain times. They will also work to support your local women in medicine groups and ensure our conferences are planned intentionally with representation in mind. 

We will stay focused on what we do, and that will require flexibility and creativity.

This is a time of assault on the idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We may come under attack as an organization founded to advance women in our specialty.  We are fortunate to have funders who understand the importance of supporting women in emergency medicine and the patients we treat. We will not shy away from our mission and are willing to be the voice that others can't be now. Other organizations with significant federal funding or complicated infrastructures may need to make choices we will not have to make. Without social media platforms to easily amplify and disseminate our work, we will have to work harder to track our impact and demonstrate our value. 

We look forward to figuring out together the best ways to hear about what is happening on the ground and the most reliable way to send updates and content.  We hope you will actively engage with the website, take our online education modules when posted, and contribute blog posts to the site. We hope you follow us on our social channels and amplify what you see, but also email us when you have an idea or want to let us know when we have been off the mark. Your active participation is crucial to the success of FemInEM 2.0. 

FemInEM 2.0 isn’t just a re-run of our old playbook. We're not using our former tools to meet this new moment.  We're evolving, and we need your active engagement as we navigate these new waters together.  But together, we will not just be okay, we'll be better:stronger, more connected, and more impactful than ever before.