Myrmecology: majority of females only within the colony

Abstract

Diversity and inclusion in science are issues that still need to be addressed and the scientific community should act urgently to overcome disparities especially because women are still underrepresented across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Information about women authoring scientific papers are important data that can help us understand if a specific field is inclusive. We focussed on the area of Myrmecology and we investigated whether first and last authorship is biased in this field. This study showed that although our research focuses on a group dominated by females (ants) in terms of authorship of papers it is still a male dominated society with no significant increases in female representation since 1990 with women representing only 35.59% of first authors and 22.90% of last authors. And despite our data showing promising trends for the last few years (2016-2018) where we see a slight increase in women as first authors however for the last author position there has still been no change. We also compared worldwide results to that of myrmecologists from Brazil, a hub of ant biological research. We conclude our study by proposing several actions that we can all do to overcome this issue and make science more equal and inclusive.