Amy Fleming in the Guardian (23 Oct 2019) reported on a study of sex bias in natural history collections by Dr Natalie Cooper from the Natural History Museum in London (NHM).  Dr Cooper’s group investigated sex rations in over 2 million bird and mammal specimens from the NHM, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and the National Museum of Natural Historu (Smithsonian Institution) and found a bias towards males.  The bias was stronger in type specimens than in the overall collections.  More importantly, Cooper’s paper outlines how such sex bias in museum collections may influence the outcome of research in taxonomy, genomics, comparative anatomy, parisitology, stable isotope ecology, toxicology, and morphological evolution.

For Fleming’s report see: https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2019/oct/23/bad-science-sexist-bias-natural-history-museums-specimens?CMP=share_btn_link

For the NHM report see: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/october/more-male-than-female-specimens-in-natural-history-collections.html

Cooper et al. 2019 Proceedings of the Royal Society B [https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2025]