If history is written by the victors, who describes the spiders? Species author trends reflect gender and geopolitical disparities in biodiversity science
Abstract
Gathering data on species description authorship is one way to track who has had access to a career in taxonomy. Via data from the World Spider Catalog, we examined trends in gender and geopolitical affiliation of taxonomists who described spider species from the Americas between 1946 and 2021. From each author citation, we inferred the gender (man or woman) of each author and the geopolitical location of their institution. Institutions were labelled as representing the Global North or South, categories corresponding to countries with more or fewer economic resources that foster access to taxonomic careers. We then used these individual author designations to calculate proportions of author teams of each gender or geopolitical category for each species described. When examining the makeup of author teams across time, we see that they have become more collaborative across gender and the geopolitical hemispheres. However, equity gaps remain when it comes to first authorship. Greater proportions of women are on teams with greater proportions of Global South authors, suggesting that when one underrepresented demographic is supported in becoming a species description author, other underrepresented demographics also benefit. This study contributes data toward understanding how we can make careers in taxonomy more accessible globally.
Montana, K. O., Gorneau, J. A., Gosnell, J. S., Crews, S. C., Xavier, C., Marta, K. S., Pantoja, P., Hannappel, M. P., Stiner, E. O., Jones, M. M., Mottershead, G., & Esposito, L. A. (2025). If history is written by the victors, who describes the spiders? Species author trends reflect gender and geopolitical disparities in biodiversity science.
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society,
146(1).
https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blaf067
