Why museums’ animal collections favour males

UNTIL RECENT years, science has been a male-dominated profession. And that bias, it turns out, is reflected not just in its practitioners. A team of researchers at the Natural History Museum in London have carried out a thorough review of the animal specimens in their own collection and in the collections of four of the world’s other great museums of natural history. They have found, as they describe in the , that, among birds and mammals at least, there is a noticeable preference for cocks, stags and drakes over hens, hinds and ducks.The team, led by Natalie Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the museum, analysed records of almost 2½m specimens in London, Paris (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle), Chicago (Field Museum), New York (American Museum of Natural History) and Washington (Smithsonian Institution). The oldest dated from 1751. The newest were from 2018. They considered only species with 100 or more representatives, to reduce the effects of chance.