The use of eponyms can also promote gender equity in modern taxonomy

There is an ongoing debate about how species are named, with several calls to revise naming conventions (e.g., Guedes et al. 2023, Harris and Xavier 2023). The science of describing species, taxonomy, has remained largely unchanged since Linnaeus introduced the binomial system centuries ago. However, naming species is largely influenced by the societal context in which scientists operate (Ceríaco et al. 2016, Mammola et al. 2023, Toussaint et al. 2024). In a hotly debated recent paper, Guedes and colleagues (2023) specifically argued that eponyms (that is, dedications to people) are predominantly assigned to “almost universally White, male upper-class Europeans” and advocated for discontinuing their use. Working on the megadiverse group of spiders (currently with more than 53,000 described living species; WSC 2025), we show that eponyms alone only partially follow this trend. Instead, dedicating species to nonscientists has actually promoted gender equity in recent decades, coinciding with an acceleration in species descriptions. In contrast, eponyms in vertebrates have predominantly been assigned to men by men, with a few notable exceptions (Garbino 2023). However, most vertebrate species were described long ago. Consequently, we show that Guedes and colleagues’ (2023) conclusions about vertebrates cannot be automatically extended to recently described species. Therefore, restricting naming practices on the basis of what has happened for vertebrates, rather than on recent and relevant data, may not be a universal solution. Instead, we advocate for moderation in species naming—for example, through editorial and peer-review processes (Orr et al. 2023).