Women are constantly underrepresented and underappreciated among the large scale of patentees

The gender gap in patenting rates is much more pronounced than the gender gap in many other endeavors: American women patent at only 8% of the male rate, according to the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, while by comparison they earn 81% of male full-time weekly earnings (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). Other sources confirm the wide patenting gap. Only 10.3% of the 90,705 U.S. origin patents granted in 1998 are estimated by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1999) to have had at least one female inventor.1 Adjusting for co-authorship, Frietsch et al. (2009) estimate that women accounted for 8.2% of patents filed by Americans at the European Patent Office in 2005, a decrease from the 8.8% peak of 2001. The highest shares were for Spain and France (12.3% and 10.2% respectively), while the lowest shares were for Austria and Germany (3.2% and 4.7% respectively).2 The magnitude of the gender gap in patenting raises the concern that, rather than reflecting comparative advantage or differing tastes by gender, the gap reflects gender inequity and an inefficient use of female innovative capacity. Innovation, or equivalently, technological progress, is a driver of economic growth and key to future prosperity: more than half of U.S. economic growth since the Second World War is attributable to technological progress (Boskin and Lau, 2000). Clearly, growth will be highest if the innovative capacity of the whole workforce is exploited, and doing so is particularly important at a time of concern about growth and technological progress. By referring to the 2007–2009 recession as a “Sputnik moment”, President Obama in 2010 called into doubt whether the United States was innovating at its full potential,3 while an influential report by the National Academy of Sciences (2007) states “…the committee is deeply concerned that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding…” Among many other recommendations, the report urges increasing the share of women in science and engineering. Innovation is difficult to measure at the individual level, and scholars use patents as a proxy. While not all innovations are patented, patenting is likely to be correlated with unpatented innovation, including innovation embodied in tacit knowledge and disseminated by inter-firm worker mobility. In this paper, we explore women's underperformance in patenting using a representative sample of U.S. college graduates, the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates. While there have been earlier quantitative studies of the question, they have been confined to samples of PhDs, generally academic scientists and engineers.4 Such samples provide only limited information about patenting generally, since our data show that over a five-year window, PhDs are granted only 29% of patents and academics only 7% of patents. Furthermore, the gender patenting gap appears to be much smaller in these samples than in the more general population we study in our paper. Although the studies generally do not report the unadjusted gender gap, we estimate based on information in the papers that women in these samples are between 40% and two–thirds as likely to patent as men, compared with 8% for the college graduates we study. Most of the gender patenting gap apparently arises because women do not get to the stage of being in the samples of earlier studies.