The Academic Advantage: Gender Disparities in Patenting

Abstract

We analyzed gender disparities in patenting by country, technological area, and type of assignee using the 4.6 million utility patents issued between 1976 and 2013 by the United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO). Our analyses of fractionalized inventorships demonstrate that women’s rate of patenting has increased from 2.7% of total patenting activity to 10.8% over the nearly 40-year period. Our results show that, in every technological area, female patenting is proportionally more likely to occur in academic institutions than in corporate or government environments. However, women’s patents have a lower technological impact than that of men, and that gap is wider in the case of academic patents. We also provide evidence that patents to which women—and in particular academic women—contributed are associated with a higher number of International Patent Classification (IPC) codes and co-inventors than men. The policy implications of these disparities and academic setting advantages are discussed.

The Research Focus of Nations: Economic vs. Altruistic Motivations

“…Industrial authors were identified as those associated with one of the 291 industrial institutions from Table 2, or whose affiliation data as indexed in Scopus contained one of the industry-related strings given in S3 Table. The major source for these strings was Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_business_entity), with some additional strings suggested by Sugimoto et al [51]. We note that the string-based search was essential given that the results from our 291 (large) industrial institutions only identified 1/3 of the industry authorships compared to the full search strategy.…”

IPR gender gaps: a first look at utility model, design right and trademark filings

“…Second, this study contributes to existing literature on gender-specific collaboration patterns by analyzing gender composition of inventor and designer teams. Studies have thus far shown that women tend to invent in larger patent inventor teams (Mauleón and Bordons 2010;Sugimoto et al 2015;Hoisl and Mariani 2016;Martinez et al 2016;Meng 2018). We extend the analysis of collaboration patterns into design rights and UMs.…”

“…The share of female inventors among all patent inventors has increased over time, and the gender gap in patenting has narrowed (Ding et al 2006;Whittington and Smith-Doerr 2008;Frietsch et al 2009;Mauleón and Bordons 2010;Jung and Ejermo 2014;Sugimoto et al 2015;Martinez et al 2016;Bell et al 2017). 2 For instance, Giuri et al (2007) report that only 2.8% of the inventors in a large European patent inventor survey (PatVal) are women.…”

“…Hoisl and Mariani (2016) reported that women are members of larger inventor teams (mean 3.3) more commonly than men (mean 2.6). Sugimoto et al (2015) documented that women have more co-inventors in all technological fields (International Patent Classification, IPC). Meng (2018) studied gender patterns in U.S. patents and provided evidence that women invent in larger inventor teams compared to men also in the field of nanotechnology.…”

Patentes mexicanas del Distrito Federal: caracterización por delegación y área tecnológica (2009-2012)

“…Existen diferentes estudios publicados en revistas de corriente principal sobre las patentes registradas en países desarrollados, como en Whittington y Smith, 12 McMillan, 13 Sugimoto et al, 14 Toivanen y Suominen, 15 pero muy pocos sobre patentes de Latinoamérica, según Barroso 16 y Guzman-Chavez et al 17 Trabajos como el de Rodríguez-Pose y Villarreal, 18 Hernández y Díaz, 19 Sánchez, García y Mendoza 20 y Vilalta y Banda-Ortiz, 21 desarrollan investigaciones regionales basadas en patentes en México y su importancia para incentivar el desarrollo innovador a nivel nacional. Igualmente la ocde 22 ha realizado estudios de patentes a nivel regional en México.…”