On April 3, 2017, the cover of the New Yorker featured artwork of a group of women surgeons looking down at an operating table. The magazine cover had an impact on Dr. Susan Pitt, an endocrine surgeon from the University of Wisconsin, who replicated the cover with her colleagues. Dr. Pitt tweeted her photo and started a social media challenge for other women surgeons to do the same. The challenge went viral, prompting women surgeons from all over the world to tweet their own photos with the hashtag #ILookLikeASurgeon. The challenge became a movement of solidarity among female surgeons to help conquer stereotypes and acknowledge diversity in the profession.
On the one-year anniversary of the challenge, our endocrine surgeons in the University of Pittsburgh/UPMC Department of Surgery, all women, recreated and tweeted the above photo in honor of the phenomenon.