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Gender differences in obtaining and maintaining patent rights

Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 307–309 (2018)Cite this article

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An examination of the prosecution and maintenance histories of approximately 2.7 million US patent applications indicates that women have less favorable outcomes than men.

Although women make up half of the population, they represent just 10% of US patent inventors and only 15% of inventors in the life sciences1,2,3,4. By tracking patent applications through the prosecution process, we found disparities between men and women inventors in the processes of obtaining and maintaining patent rights. Patent applications by women inventors were found to be more likely to be rejected than those of men, and those rejections were less likely to be appealed by the applicant team (inventor, assignee, and prosecuting attorney). Conditional on being granted, patent applications by women inventors had a smaller fraction of their claims allowed, on average, than did applications by men. Further, those claims allowed had more words added during prosecution, thus reducing their scope and value. The granted patents of women inventors also received fewer citations than those of men and were less likely to be maintained by their assignees. Surprisingly, many of these effects were larger in the life sciences than in other technology areas.

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Figure 1: Estimated differences for teams of all women inventors relative to teams of all men, in the processes of obtaining and maintaining patent rights.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to IPwe for access to patent data via Zuse Analytics and to T. Botelho and I. Fernandez-Mateo for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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  1. Kyle Jensen, Balázs Kovács and Olav Sorenson are at the Yale School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

    Kyle Jensen, Balázs Kovács & Olav Sorenson

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  1. Kyle Jensen
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  2. Balázs Kovács
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  3. Olav Sorenson
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Correspondence to Kyle Jensen, Balázs Kovács or Olav Sorenson.

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Jensen, K., Kovács, B. & Sorenson, O. Gender differences in obtaining and maintaining patent rights. Nat Biotechnol 36, 307–309 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4120

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