"A focus on females can improve science and conservation" (and some brief thoughts on bias in the scientific community)
image from femalebirdsong.org. I'll start talking about birds later in this post, I promise.
humans are biased — I doubt that comes as a surprise to most people. We demand a lot from our brain: the brain needs to be able to make split-second decisions, and know when split-second decisions are necessary, and it needs to navigate complex sensory inputs, and it needs to do all that very efficiently because it's running on the same fuel as the heart, the lungs, the everything-else. Bias arises as the brain takes shortcuts, which may or may not be formed based on solid information. e.g., a cisgender person who knows no transgender people & only hears about this transgender "other" second- or third-hand, exaggerated and falsified ... that cis person now finds transgender people inherently less trustworthy, more emotionally volatile.
everyone is biased, and acknowledging that fact is what allows attempts to address it. That's why ideas like the "scientific method", which seek to become as unbiased/objective as possible, are being augmented by onboarding research-collaborators of more varied backgrounds. Now, research will never produce a truly objective or unbiased outcome, and remembering this is foundational in the effort to get as close to objectivity as possible. after all, the definition of "objectivity" and "bias" are human-conceived, researchers are humans are biased ... who gets to ask research questions, and what questions get asked, aren't neutral.
...We know quite a lot about extinct organisms in what is now the USA, because the USA is wealthy and therefore has a lot of universities that can organize palaeontology research teams, and also deserts that are easier to dig in than rainforests are. countless such examples.
...Not to mention, the "scientific method" is a thing dreamed up in Europe by Europeans, and so of course the hundreds and thousands of years of knowledge built up by communities outside of Europe (e.g. Indigenous people on Turtle Island) don't satisfy its demands and so are immediately discounted as unscientific mumbo-jumbo and ignored.
In her brilliant books, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes undertaking research, scientific-method-style, to prove to the scientific community that Indigenous knowledge is valid and correct — and how the idea of doing just that was considered silly because of the mere implication that such "unscientific" knowledge might have merit.
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now is when I'm going to talk about birds. More specifically, I'm going to talk about Wu et al.'s 2025 publication, A focus on females can improve science and conservation, which is about birds.
also from femalebirdsong.org.
Wu et al. is one of those wonderful papers that tells everyone to Sit Down and Listen — here's a bias in our research, here's why it's a problem ... let's start doing something about it. The basic premise is that generally, research on species tends to lump different sexes into the one category of The Same Species, or if it does attempt to define between-sex differences, the focus drifts towards the males only. In birds, males can be much easier to identify than females due to male display plumage and song, and many guides lack good information on identifying female individuals (which may resemble juveniles, or other species. Catching birds in flight (e.g. mist netting) tends to yield more males than females if the females are staying with the nest.
Some reasons for underreporting female birds are that (1) the tendency to focus on ‘species’ as the default unit of study overshadows intraspecific differences, (2) identification knowledge on female birds is sparser than on males and (3) detection and survey protocols tend to favour male birds ... Overall, female birds are understudied and misunderstood, potentially leading to false assumptions and critical knowledge gaps.
two female and one male rose-breasted grosbeaks. Note the females don't even have the namesake rose-breast...!
(btw, this understanding is where femalebirdsong.org is operating from. We need specific effort to document female bird information to make up the knowledge gap.)
but it's not just the practical females-are-less-distinct thing, though. As with the pre-bird-preamble, the bias of the researchers (as individuals, as a member of a culture, so on) is also to blame.
The fundamental idea of defined ‘sex roles’, where males compete for highly selective females and females perform the majority of offspring-rearing duties, stems largely from Charles Darwin's influential writings (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex; Darwin 1872). However, those notions may be derived more from human sociobiological preconceptions than the natural world (Dagg 1984, Mokos et al. 2021). Indeed, the very use of the term ‘sex roles’ has since been deemed problematic because sexual behaviour is a continuum rather than a dichotomous category (Ah-King & Ahnesjö 2013, McLaughlin et al. 2023).
"women belong in the home" ...& to the misogynist researcher (historically a boy's club, and regardless embedded in a misogynist, bioessentialist culture!), the rule applies to the female bird as well. says they: females are females regardless of species, and their role is to stay home and take care of the kids.
and, as Wu et al. explains, these assumptions and biases have potentially huge consequences. Birds reproduce sexually, and so both male and female birds need to survive and be in good health. If female birds have different behaviors, needs, etc, than expected, and if their populations are more poorly-monitored and poorly-understood, there may well be threats to species survival that aren't known because they predominantly affect females. Some examples given include sexes using different habitats outside of the breeding season and having different arrival times to breeding grounds, both of which are dangerous in combination with climate change and human schedules like hunting season.
Wu et al. is the kind of paper I celebrate & then write a blog post about because of the origins of the knowledge gap in a socially-fabricated devaluation of a group in-tandem with its broad implications for future research. Science is biased, has been biased, and the noble goal of objectivity is pursued by acknowledging bias and calling it out. This essential function is being undermined by reddit-atheist-types insisting that science is objective, or right-wingers thinking that efforts to diversify the groups of people able to become scientists are "DEI nonsense". Science isn't objective, and that's why it needs to consider input from as many people as possible. because someone might come along and say Hey, you've forgotten something ... and in doing so, open up an abundance of new lines of inquiry, questions that may well shake the foothold of tired old kyriarchal beliefs.
at least I'd like to hope so, as one amongst the underrepresented-demographies. I can dream. and to move forward towards this deconstruction — fellow researchers, please, celebrate studies like Wu et al.
Maybe you're a cis man so you think this is all very silly. But isn't the whole point of this line of work to ask questions and break down misconceptions? Come and listen then, because people may ask questions that may not have even crossed your mind.
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thanks to the friend who sent me Wu et al. in the first place!
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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