Who leads diversity efforts in science? Evidence of minority tax in DEI committees of international learned societies in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Learned societies are key in shaping scientific communities, yet many face inequities rooted in their histories and governance. The inequities can be addressed by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committees or officers, but little is known about these organisational structures. We present the first analysis of 70 DEI structures across 50 international ecology and evolutionary biology societies, based on public information for 558 named DEI committee members/officers. We found that DEI structures were primarily (94%) staffed by individuals affiliated with highly developed countries, but often with immigrant backgrounds (31%). Also, 11% likely originated from medium- or low-developed countries and 13% from non-English countries. Women and gender‑diverse individuals (72%) were overrepresented in DEI structures, especially in leadership roles (82%). Public visibility of serving members is generally low. Overall, this pattern indicates that unpaid, undervalued service disproportionately falls on the groups DEI efforts aim to support, reflecting a “minority tax.” Notably, during 2025, 13 out of 54 societies (24%) removed, renamed, or anonymised DEI web pages, coinciding with the political shift in the US. Our recommendations highlight the need for learned societies to formally recognise the labour, reward, empower, resource, and protect DEI efforts to ensure lasting, equitable impact. https://doi.org/10.32942/X29M10 Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences marginalised and underrepresented groups, meta-research, open science, professional and academic organisations, scientific societies, academic governance, geographic representation Published: 2026-03-10 19:01 Last Updated: 2026-03-10 19:01 CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no competing interests except the society memberships as in the manuscript. To manage potential conflicts of interests team members did not extract or cross-check data from societies they are members of. Data and Code Availability Statement: Data and code will be publicly available after double-blinded peer review is completed by a submission journal. Language: English