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Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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Bridging Research and Communities: Advancing Entomology Through Collaborative Science

If history is written by the victors, who describes the spiders? Species author trends reflect gender and geopolitical disparities in biodiversity science

Wednesday, November 12, 2025
9:50 AM - 10:10 AM Pacific
Location: Oregon Convention Center, E145, OCC
Oral Presentation
Apart from the scientific importance, species descriptions are crucial for policy, conservation, human wellbeing, and the sustainable use of natural resources. As an enterprise underpinning all biological and even some cultural research, species descriptions offer uniquely transformative opportunities for the global collaboration of individuals from different fields and cultures. In order to become more inclusive in our scientific practice, we must establish efficient and inclusive research communities that broaden the idea of collaborators beyond the traditional academic community, extending to the expertise of non-academic scientists, community-based volunteers, and traditional knowledge-holders. To do so, we must acknowledge how the historic and ongoing role of colonialism and racism within our own institutions exerts significant influence on the practice of species descriptions, limiting this practice to those with access to global resources, and to the detriment of the field. While most resources, including comprehensive scientific collections and historical literature, are located in the global north, the most critical need for documenting biodiversity is in the global south. Gathering data on species description authorship is one way to examine who has historically 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. We present data about the trends of author teams in taxonomic publishing across time, and present some reccomendations for broadening participation.