What's in a mineral name? Not very many women, study finds

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The mineral scottyite was named after Michael Scott.

Not the Michael Scott of the television series "The Office"—the Michael Scott who co-founded the technology company Apple. Billionaire George Soros likewise has a mineral, called sorosite, named after him. There's rooseveltite, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leifite after Leif Erickson. Another mineral, dewindtite, was named after a budding 23-year-old geologist named Jean Charles Louis De Windt, who drowned while swimming in a quarry.

Notably absent from this list are any minerals named after women. In fact, of the minerals named after people, 94% have been named after men, according to a study led by recent University of Michigan doctoral graduate Chris Emproto.

Emproto combed through nearly 6,000 mineral names and found that while 50.7% of all minerals are named after men, just 2.8% of all minerals are named after women. Emproto and his co-authors were interested in understanding how this proportion has changed over time and determining when gender parity could be expected in the earth sciences.

"Gender doesn't pertain to how rocks and minerals form. In the absence of any systemic barriers, we would expect gender equity or gender demographics that are consistent. But we don't see that," he said.

Instead, the researchers found that growth in the proportion of women among new minerals named for people had stalled decades ago—even as more women were becoming scientists. Growth began to slow by the mid-1980s, and by the 2000s, that proportion had reached an equilibrium: only about 10% of minerals named after people in a given year were named for women. If the current rate of naming conventions holds, women will never achieve gender parity in terms of new minerals named after them.

Emproto's results are published in the journal American Mineralogist.

"What's interesting is that we slowly stopped making progress towards gender parity in new mineral names over the last 20 years or so, even though it feels like we've been making steady progress towards gender parity in the field itself," Emproto said.

Minerals are most often named by the collectors and scientists who find them. Once the properties of the new mineral are determined, a proposal is submitted for approval to an organization called the International Mineralogical Association Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature, and Classification. Only a few rules are imposed on new mineral names: reuse of an obsolete or discredited name should not happen within 50 years, and new names must not be too similar to existing names.

Minerals are often named after a specific property of the mineral, where it's found, or for arbitrary reasons: Emproto points out "olympite," named for the 1980 Olympic Games. Naming minerals after people is the largest category of arbitrary names.

As of April 2023, a total of 3,294 minerals are named for people, representing 2,742 individuals. These people are "scientists, miners, engineers, mineral collectors, poets, politicians, philosophers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and explorers from every inhabited continent," the researchers note.

Just 167 of these people with a mineral honorific are women. However, this also includes 23 minerals that share their names with a man. No minerals in the dataset were named after multiple women.

To evaluate these naming conventions, the research team recorded and categorized all 5,901 minerals approved by the IMA or "grandfathered" into use as of December 2022 into a database. They used a binary gender system in the study, but acknowledge that system does not represent gender diversity in the geosciences, Emproto said.

The first two minerals named after women are marialite and laurite, both discovered and named in 1866. Marialite was named for Maria vom Rath, the wife of the German mineralogist Gerhard vom Rath, who discovered the mineral. Friedrich Wöhler named laurite after Laura Rupe Joy, the wife of his close friend, the American chemist Charles Arad Joy.

It wasn't until 1924 that a mineral was named after a female scientist: the radioactive mineral sklodowskite was named for Marie Skłodowska Curie. But her husband, Pierre Curie, beat her to the name game: the mineral curite was named after Pierre in 1921.

"There was steady progress from the 1950s to about 1985 or 1990, and then things started to trail off," Emproto said. "But the most interesting thing is that this increase in rate is mostly driven by just a few regions."

Russians comprise 15% of all minerals named after people, but are responsible for nearly half—43%—of minerals named for women. The United States ranks second, but Russia has nearly three times the number of women with minerals named for them, 72, compared to the U.S.

Researchers may expect the rate of minerals named after women to increase as more women become involved in the sciences, but that hasn't been the case. By 1985, women earned 26% of geosciences undergraduate degrees and 24% of geosciences graduate degrees. By 2017, those numbers had increased to 43% and 30%. Even so, the increase in the rate of minerals named after women plateaued in the mid-1980s, Emproto said.

The researchers projected how long it would take for men and women to be equally represented by new mineral names—that is, there is an equal proportion of women and men among only new mineral names—assuming that the rate of new mineral discoveries increases as it has since 1950. They found that gender parity would occur around the year 2266. At this rate, people would need to find more than 44,000 as yet undiscovered minerals—something researchers don't expect to happen.

Alternatively, to reach equal representation on a year-on-year basis by the year 2057, the proportion of minerals named for women would need to increase by about 12% annually.

"It's not time to pat ourselves on the back. Not only do we have the unsurprising result that women are significantly outnumbered by men in a field that has nothing to do with gender, but the progress we have made came to a halt a while ago," Emproto said.

"We will probably run out of minerals before we reach equity, and if we do achieve that gender equity, it will be at a time when there are very few minerals left to name."

More information: Christopher Emproto et al, Gender in Mineral Names, American Mineralogist (2024). DOI: 10.2138/am-2024-9327

Journal information: American Mineralogist

Provided by University of Michigan