Though there is still a long way to go in resolving the disparity in pay for men and women, there has recently been an increase in attention to the gender pay gap.
Another similar gender gap — that has not yet become as mainstream but is of an extremely serious nature since it deals with matters of health — is the gender patenting gap. Significantly more men than women in the U.S. have had their inventions patented, and this is particularly true for women of color.
When it comes to reaching the same percentage of patents as men, at the current rate of progress, women can expect to catch up in the year 2092. Before we go into the hows and whys, let’s talk numbers.
What Is the Gender Gap in U.S. Patents?
In brief, only 16% of all patents in the U.S. had at least one woman inventor credited — but that does not mean a woman was the sole inventor; this percentage could mean the inventors were a group of people with only one woman in a team of mostly men. In relation to primary women inventors, only 7.7% of all patents had a sole woman credited.
There does not seem to be a logical explanation as to why women should be left out of (or behind) the equation, but there are some explanations nonetheless, including biases in early stage feedback and lack of proper mentoring. One of the main reasons, however, stems from the low representation of women in STEM fields, with Black, Hispanic, and Native American women being especially underrepresented.
Why Is Inventor Diversity Important?
This issue isn’t just about gender equity in careers and entrepreneurship — the result of this bias is that there are fewer innovative products created to help women’s health. Women researching, inventing, and patenting their innovations can change and even save many women’s lives.
Of the 7.7% of patents that listed a woman as the sole inventor, most of them involved jewelry and fashion items. While it is, of course, important for women to own their own businesses and have successful careers doing whatever they love, there is currently a great need for biomedical inventions by women.
“Although the percentage of biomedical patents held by women has risen from 6.3% to 16.2% over the last three decades, men continue to significantly outnumber women as patent holders,” says John-Paul Ferguson, associate professor at McGill University. “As a result, health inventions have tended to focus more on the needs of men than women.”
Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, Rembrand Koning, conducted research that showed that from 1976 to 2010, hundreds more inventions by male (or mostly male) research teams were focused on the needs of men than of women, and that, were there pay parity, an additional 6,500 more female-focused inventions would be available today. Unfortunately, many medical issues regarding female health, including pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, to name a few, are missing necessary inventions that even in this day and age, have yet to be created.
Professor Koning’s own wife was surprised, after giving birth in 2017, by the abysmal technology available for new mothers, including hard-to-use baby scales and breast pumps, and hardly any help available for the pre-eclampsia she experienced.
Elina Berglund, a New York City-based particle physicist, and inventor of the fertility tracking app Natural Cycles, explained that the reason women are more likely to create inventions that help other women is that they have likely experienced or are close to the problem the innovation can solve. Simply put, women’s inventions are more likely to be more focused on women, and these are much-needed.
Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has listed some all-important recommendations for increasing women’s patenting and closing the gender gap. These include developing systems and data tools for tracking women’s progress in patents; since the U.S. patent office does not collect demographic information, it’s possible that some inventions have not been credited as being invented by a woman.
In addition, the institute has recommended that employers offer women assistance with their patents 一 especially since they typically earn less than men 一 and that more should be done to support efforts to improve gender diversity within STEM fields, including encouraging girls at a young age to learn about STEM, to be innovators, and to become entrepreneurs.
Finally, a thorough evaluation needs to be done of the patenting process itself as research has shown that applications for patents made by women are more likely to be rejected. Though this research is limited, it’s still worth looking into, given the massive gender gap responsible for an array of missing female-focused inventions.
