#Immodestwomen

I've been on Twitter since 2012 (?) and have never really got involved in Twitter spats or trending hashtags. I'm more of a lurker, prolifically tweeting when attending conferences, or when either #SCD or #GBBO are on the telly. That is, until when someone on my timeline retweeted a tweet by Dr Fern Riddell, challenging her for being vulgar and immodest for including "Dr" in her twitter name and claiming her doctorate in the text of her tweet...

I perused the thread, and, unusually for me, sent a tweet of sympathy that there were such mysogenistic knobs on twitter, toyed briefly with the idea of updating my twitter name, and decided not to draw attention to myself.
Later that day on Twitter, I noticed a friend's twitter name had been updated to include "Dr", so went back to the thread to see what had happened. A lot. Apparently, quite a few men had taken exception to Dr Riddell's action (without having bothered to read the causative story) and a plethora of women twitter users had come out in support. Tweeting "Oh, go on then..." I changed my twitter name to Dr Jackie Marchington (can't mess about with @blazingocelots, after all, I'm Dr Marchington, not Dr Blazingocelots). At that point, the hashtags were #changeyourtwitterhandle, and #makethisathing. I started keeping an eye on things and witnessed the emergence of #ImmodestWoman/#ImmodestWomen.
So what kicked this all off? Dr Riddell took umbrage at a Canadian news outlet's decision to update their style guide such that only medics would be referred to as "Dr" and nobody else, regardless of qualifications. Quite a big insult to those of us who have actually earned a doctorate, rather than having been awarded the honorary, courtesy title of "Dr" (browse the hashtag if you want to know the history of that...). Dr Riddell's original tweet was to object to the nullification of her title in the media. Nothing more. A couple of mysogenistic men took offence at her asserting her academic qualifications and focussed their objections on gender, not qualification (the original tweet that sparked my interest has since been deleted).
The emergence of the #ImmodestWomen hashtag has provoked me to actually engage on twitter, and tell a few twitterati what I think. As is often the case on twitter, people don't bother looking at the whole story. Dr Riddell didn't turn this into a gender argument. Similarly, if people are going to make snarky remarks, then they really should know what they're snarking about. I don't expect anything to change, but one of the things about twitter that has always stopped me from engaging is that people don't bother to read the underlying story, or the original fact. It's similar to the "read beyond the abstract" - if you're going to take a stance or have an opinion, do it based on knowledge, not just what the last idiot in the thread tweeted about.

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SInce the #ImmodestWomen hashtag started trending, the BBC have picked up the story, and Dr Riddell has written a short piece on how things so rapidly became all about gender.