Women Make Up Half of Medical School. They Hold Less Than 30% of Leadership Roles. The Pipeline Isn't the Problem.

She had about 75 followers on Twitter. She posted about a patient who couldn't access their narcotic prescription, tagged the opioid crisis, and didn't think much of it. There happened to be a major opioid conference in Washington that same weekend. The tweet went viral — or, as she puts it, viral for her at the time. Suddenly there were journalists in her mentions. News producers reaching out. Requests to comment on things. She had not set out to become a media voice. She had just said something that needed to be said.

That is, in a sentence, how Shikha Jain, MD operates. She is a triple board-certified oncologist, a tenured associate professor at the University of Illinois Cancer Center, the founder of a national 501(c)3 nonprofit, the chair of an annual summit that has grown from 450 attendees to a multi-day national event, and a physician whose New York Times work was nominated for a News Emmy. None of it was planned. All of it was driven by the same impulse: if qualified people don't use their voices, the space gets filled by people who shouldn't be there.

Part One: The Voice She Found

From Op-Eds to National Television — Unpaid

The media path started with writing. She began publishing op-eds — in CNN, USA Today, US News — and amplifying them through social media. That built a portfolio. The portfolio attracted attention. When the pandemic arrived and news organizations needed credible medical voices fast, she was already visible. Fox 32 in Chicago asked her to come on. She said yes from her bedroom, her husband arranging a semicircle of lamps for lighting, her computer balanced on a stack of eight textbooks to reach eye level. She was asked back as a regular contributor.

Over the following years, that expanded — MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, ABC7, WGN, CBS, and eventually a New York Times piece that earned a News Emmy nomination. She attended the ceremony in New York, met Dana Bash and Abby Phillips, saw Al Roker, and held an Emmy. They didn't win. She doesn't sound particularly bothered.

"If we are not the ones telling people what is the evidence, what is the science, how we make decisions for our patients — then there are going to be people doing it for personal gain, and there will be no one to counter them."

— Shikha Jain, MD, FACP

None of the television appearances are paid. Her husband, she notes with some amusement, asks her about this regularly. Her answer is always the same: the misinformation landscape is real, the stakes are real, and the physicians best equipped to counter it are the ones not doing it. Someone has to.

The Lake Shore Drive Interview

The story that best captures her approach to media is this one. She was driving home down Lake Shore Drive with her three kids in the backseat and her mother in the passenger seat. A producer called — could she do a phone interview in thirty minutes? She said yes. She told the car to be quiet for seven minutes. Her mother asked what would happen if the signal dropped. She said hopefully it wouldn't. It didn't. The segment aired in the evening hour. Her mother watched it and found the whole thing remarkable. For Jain, it was Tuesday.

What the media work has done, beyond platform, is sharpen her clinical communication. She now has a real-time read on what patients are encountering online — which wellness influencer claims are circulating, which fears are being stoked, which half-truths are convincing people in the middle who haven't fully committed to either evidence-based medicine or misinformation. That middle group, she argues, is exactly who physicians need to learn to reach. Not the people who already agree, and not the ideologically committed skeptics — but the ones who are genuinely trying to figure out what to believe.

Part Two: The Moment It Became a Movement

The Pattern She Couldn't Ignore

For a long time, when difficult things happened in her career — the slights, the overlooked contributions, the structural friction that women in medicine encounter as a matter of routine — she assumed she was the cause. She wasn't good enough. She wasn't smart enough. She was the problem. This is, she now understands, an extremely common response among women in medicine. The culture makes it easy to internalize what is actually a systemic issue as a personal failing.

The shift came when she started engaging more publicly — through writing, through Twitter, through the early op-ed work — and began hearing the same things from other women. Not similar experiences, but the same experiences. The same patterns, described by physicians in different institutions, different specialties, different cities. The realization was clarifying: this wasn't her. It had never been her.

"I had always assumed I was the problem. I thought this happened because I wasn't good enough. And then I listened to all these women and I was like — this is a systemic problem. I'm not the problem."

— Shikha Jain, MD, FACP

Building Women in Medicine from a Symposium to a 501(c)3

In 2018, she co-founded the Women in Medicine Symposium at Northwestern Memorial Hospital — a smaller, local event. It was well received enough that she decided the concept needed to be national. The first Women in Medicine Summit happened in 2019 at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. About 450 people attended. She was, she says, just thrilled that anyone showed up.

Then COVID hit in March of 2020, and she had hundreds of people reaching out asking what to do. Rather than pause, she built. She launched leadership programming, a speakers bureau, a research lab, allyship programming. Her father — a surgeon who had modeled the art of explaining complex things simply to his patients and to his children at the dinner table — told her she had more than just a conference. She took that seriously.

Women in Medicine is now an official 501(c)3 nonprofit. The annual summit — entering its seventh year — has expanded into the Power of Women in Medicine Summit, with one full day of women's health programming added for the first time alongside two full days of leadership content. Men attend. Many come back year after year, calling it one of the best leadership conferences they've encountered. The summit, she is clear, is not an us-versus-them exercise. It is a structural intervention in a system that has been losing exceptional physicians to harassment, burnout, and marginalization, and doing so at a cost that extends directly to patient outcomes.

Part Three: What the Data Says

Why This Is a Patient Care Issue, Not Just an Equity Issue

The business case for Women in Medicine — if one is needed — is not primarily about fairness. It is about outcomes. The research is unambiguous: women physicians spend more time with patients. Patients report feeling more comfortable disclosing more to them. Women surgeons have lower mortality and morbidity rates when operating on patients of all genders. Institutions led by women consistently show better patient satisfaction scores, more awards, and stronger retention. When the NIH finally required women to be included in federally funded research in the 1990s — a requirement that did not exist before then — it began to transform what medicine understood about how disease presents and progresses differently across sexes.

"It's not that one gender is better than the other. It's that we are losing women who are exceptional — in clinical care, in leadership — because they're getting bullied and harassed. And we have data showing that their loss costs patients."

— Shikha Jain, MD, FACP

Over 50% of current medical students identify as women. At the leadership level — department chairs, deans, C-suite — the number drops below 30%. The pipeline is full. The attrition is structural. Women in Medicine exists, Jain argues, not to fix the women but to fix the system — because the system, not the women, is what's broken.

She has an 11-year-old daughter. She thinks about her often. She doesn't want her daughter to inherit fewer rights or fewer opportunities than she had. The work of Women in Medicine is, in the end, both clinical and personal. The data supports it, the evidence demands it, and she has been saying so — in op-eds, on news segments, in hotel ballrooms with hundreds of physicians in the audience — ever since a tweet with a hashtag went unexpectedly viral and gave her a platform she didn't plan for and has never stopped using.

Shikha Jain, MD wanted to be a singer when she was ten. She thought she might become a surgeon like her father. She ended up as an oncologist, a media voice, an Emmy-nominated journalist, and the founder of a national movement — none of which she anticipated. What she did anticipate, from as early as she can remember, is that she was not the problem. It just took medicine a while to confirm it.