The Academic Advantage: Gender Disparities in Patenting

May The Academic Advantage: Gender Disparities in Patenting Cassidy R. Sugimoto 0 1 2 Chaoqun Ni 0 1 2 Jevin D. West 0 1 2 Vincent Larivire 0 1 2 0 1 School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America, 2 School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 University of Washington Information School , Seattle , Washington, United States of America, 4 Ecole de bibliotheconomie et des sciences de l'information, Universite de Montreal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Succ. Centre-ville , Montreal, Quebec , Canada , 5 Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Succ. Centre-Ville , Montreal, Quebec , Canada 1 Academic Editor: Alejandro Raul Hernandez Montoya, Universidad Veracruzana , MEXICO 2 Contains represented, as in The Government Of The United States Of America As Represented By The Secretary, Department Of Health & Human Services, Center For Disease Control. government secretary united states We analyzed gender disparities in patenting by country, technological area, and type of asStates 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. - Funding: This work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs program (Vincent Larivire), Fonds de Recherche du QubecSocit et Culture (FRQSC) (Vincent Larivire), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Coucil of Canada (Vincent Larivire), and the NSFSciSIP Program (Cassidy Sugimoto). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Innovation is critical to economic development [1] and depends upon the full participation of the scientific workforce [2]. Yet, the growing field of innovation studies [3] demonstrates that there are many disparities in the exploitation of human capacity for innovation. Two particularly well-noted areas are the dearth of academic and female innovators [4, 5]. The response to this lack of innovation in the academic sector has been to stress academic entrepreneurship, which encompasses the varied ways in which faculty at educational institutions engage in innovative and high risk activities which have the potential for financial rewards for the individual or the institution with which they are affiliated [6]. This is most typically operationalized as commercialization of science activities such as patenting [2], which was heavily promoted following the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 in the United States and similar initiatives in other countries [5]. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Historical studies have shown that the rate of female patenting from 1637 to the mid-20th century failed to exceed 2% of total patenting [7]. Contemporary studies suggest that women may continue to be underrepresented [4, 8, 9]; however, studies on rates of female patenting are largely monodisciplinary, localized, and lack explicit connections to the types of settings where the patenting is conducted. This study addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of 4.6 million utility patents issued between 1976 and 2013 by the United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO). The data includes 10.8 million inventors and 4.2 million assignees (owners of the property of the patents that are different from inventors). The need to understand diversity in patenting was stressed in the 2010 America Invents Act (AIA2010), which mandated the Director of the USPTO establish methods for studying the diversity of patent applicants, including those applicants who are minorities, women, or veterans [10]. The 2013 Federal Register [11] disclosed the first analysis of the 20052006 USPTO data, discussed the poor matching of inventors with Census data, and called for public comment on how to study the diversity of patent applicants pursuant to AIA2010. This paper answers the USPTO call by providing a comprehensive analysis of women in all USPTO patents, taking into account diversity by patent area and inventor country, and type of assignees. This study imported the 4.6 million utility patents granted by the USPTO between 1976 and 2013 into an SQL database for analysis. Inventors from more than 185 countries invented patents issued by the USPTO. While most patents (53.44%) were invented by US inventors, 19.36% were from Japan, 7.08% from Germany, 2.6% from the UK, 2.43% from France, 2.22% from South Korea, 2.08% from Taiwan and 2.06% from Canada. On the whole, these 8 countries account for 91.37% of all inventorships of the dataset. The identification of inventor gender is an essential task for this research. In this study, the gender classification of inventors in the USPTO database is perceived using the approach introduced in our earlier work [12]. The master list of name-gender assignments were created using universal and country-specific name lists. Universal lists were applied to the entire set of Web of Science authors, and country-specific lists were applied to subsets of Web of Science authors associated with the corresponding countries. This approach for name-gender classification has been manually validated [12]. For more detailed information on name-gender classification, please refer to [12]. The accuracy of the gender assignation table varies by country. For the United States for instance, 90.8% of inventor-patent combinationsthat is the sum of all inventors names appearing on all patentswere assigned to a gender, leaving less than 10% of unassigned combinations, due to unisex names (2.0%), the use of initials only (0.1%) or to unknown names (7.1%). In addition to the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia have very high gender assignation rates, with more than 90% of all inventor-patent combinations assigned to either female or male. The assignation rate is much lower for India (66.1%), South Korea (66.4%), Taiwan (72.9%), and the Netherlands (72.9%). At the world level, 86.9% of all inventor-patent combinations were assigned to a gender. This proportion of assig (...truncated)