Multimodal models of animal sex in scientific literature: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution

‘Sex’ is often used to describe a suite of phenotypic and genotypic traits of an organism related to reproduction. However, not all these traits are necessarily linked, and the rhetorical collapse of variation into a single term elides much of the complexity inherent in reproductive phenotypes. We conducted a meta-analysis of scientific literature to investigate how terminology related sexual phenotypes changes over time. We find that the conflation of gender and sex has increased, and there is a mammalian bias in this conflation. We highlight how a more inclusive and expansive framework for sex can clarify studies of sexual diversity.