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Gender differences in obtaining and maintaining patent rights

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.

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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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Correspondence to Kyle Jensen, Balázs Kovács or Olav Sorenson.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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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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