Why Aren't There More Female Patent-Holders?

(Photo: Michael Neubert)

We’ve blogged before about gender inequality and the persistent male/female wage gap.  A new working paper by Jennifer Hunt, Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, and David J. Munroe highlights another arena where women are lagging: commercialized patents. Only 7.5 percent of regular patent and 5.5 percent of commercial patent holders are female.  The authors explored various explanations for the gap:

Using the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, we find only 7% of the gap is accounted for by women’s lower probability of holding any science or engineering degree, because women with such a degree are scarcely more likely to patent than women without. Differences among those without a science or engineering degree account for 15%, while 78% is accounted for by differences among those with a science or engineering degree. For the latter group, we find that women’s underrepresentation in engineering and in jobs involving development and design explain much of the gap…

The disparity has real economic consequences: “The gender patenting gap is of economic significance: eliminating the patenting shortfall of female holders of science and engineering degrees would increase GDP per capita by 2.7%.”