2025/06/18 by Sabine von Mering, Sandra Knapp, Siobhan Leachman +4 · 2 voices
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Psychology · #Animal and Plant Science Education #Botanical Studies and Applications #Plant and animal studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/ppp3.70050
openalex publication_date 2025/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Societal Impact Statement Many flowering plant genera are named for people, but there is a gender gap in this naming, with only 6% of eponyms honouring women. Here we explore this gap by examining in detail women for whom plant genera are named. Our open shared dataset serves to make women honoured in plant genera more discoverable, resulting in further impact by allowing others to make use of this research and amplifying their stories. This will be of particular interest to those working on the history of science, those compiling datasets featuring women, those involved in knowledge production and those in education wishing to find narratives for more balanced gender representation. Summary In this study, we analyse a dataset of flowering plant genera named for women both real and mythical to understand historical and social patterns in naming genera to honour women. We used as a basis for this work a dataset composed of printed references and an extract of existing plant genera names from published databases to update Wikidata. A combination of the original dataset and extracts from Wikidata were used for analysis. The inclusion of our work in Wikidata means that this information can be reused by anyone to investigate their own questions around plant naming and women in natural history. We examined the proportions of mythical versus real women honoured genus names over time and for the real women, by occupation or role. We found that representation of real women increased over that of mythical women through time, with the number of genera named for real women overtaking mythical figures in the 1930s. Real women with connections to ‘green’ or botanical work also increased over time and seem to be on the increase today.