Patent Diversity Gap

For Ellington West, it was being talked over during a pitch. For Dr. Therese Canares, it was the skeptical questions from a banker as she attempted to open a business account.

Starting your own business is difficult enough but being a woman founder brings additional unique challenges. It is perhaps especially true in digital health, where women-led startups are more likely to be bootstrapped and less likely to be venture-backed.

West, CEO of Sonavi Labs, and Canares, CEO of CurieDx, both of Baltimore, have faced adversity as woman founders. However, they have continued to grow their companies and networks, drawing support from regional digital health resources, including the Chesapeake Digital Health Exchange (CDHX).

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This report updates the USPTO’s 2019 report on U.S. women inventor-patentees, “Progress and Potential,” using three years of new data, covering 2017 through 2019. It provides new information on women’s participation in the U.S. patent system, finding, among other things, that women make up an increasing share of all new entrants to the patent system, rising from about 5% of new inventor-patentees in 1980 to 17.3% by 2019. Innovation Council supports efforts to collect data on participation by minorities in IP systems. Data collection is the first step towards policymaking to support better access for minorities, including but not only women, to IP tools they can use to grow their businesses.

This paper, by Gema Lax Martinez, Julio Raffo and Kaori Saito, analyzes the gender of inventors in international patent applications. The authors compile a worldwide gender-name dictionary, which includes 6.2 million names for 182 different countries, which they use to discern the gender of PCT inventors. The results of the researchers suggest that there is a gender imbalance in PCT applications, but that the proportion of women inventors is improving over time. They also find that the rates of women’s participation differ substantially across countries, technological fields and sectors.

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Jozefina Cutura explains that, despite marked improvements in gender equality, gender gaps persist in patenting and in women’s ability to commercialize their creative and innovative output. Under its Policy on Gender Equality, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) must integrate a gender perspective into its policies and programs. Given the gender disparities in patenting, WIPO is undertaking a project on increasing the role of women in innovation and entrepreneurship, which aims, in particular, to encourage women in developing countries to use the intellectual property (IP) system.

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Innovation Council Director Jennifer Brant, alongside co-authors Elodie Carpentier, Utsav Bahl, and Aikaterini Kanellia published a global literature review earlier this spring (May, 2024) in WIPO’s Economic Research Working Paper No.86, titled ‘Closing Innovation and Intellectual Property Diversity Gaps: a Global Literature Review’.

See below for the full abstract:

Innovation is a driver of competitive advantage and economic growth, with patent rights playing a critical supporting role. However, differential access to patent rights and relatively less participation in innovation can affect women and people from other historically underrepresented groups, thereby hindering progress and limiting the potential economic benefits generated by innovation. This paper reviews the global literature on these “diversity gaps”, identifies their key drivers, and documents international policies and initiatives that show promise in addressing them. Building upon Shapanka and Fechner (2018), it expands the geographic scope and reinforces the scientific basis of their analysis. The paper also provides recommendations for a wide range of stakeholders and offers insights for fostering more inclusive and equitable innovation ecosystems.

See here for the full publication.

Jennifer Brant, Executive Director of Innovation Council, Co-author of “Policy Approaches to Close the Intellectual Property Gender Gap – Practices to Support Access to the Intellectual Property System for Female Innovators, Creators and Entrepreneurs”, spoke in a sharing session on “Women and IP” organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

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African Women Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP) Nigeria has urged women entrepreneurs to embrace collaboration and diversify their businesses to ensure sustainability.

Speaking at the annual general meeting and conference of the group in Abuja, the keynote speaker, Steve Ogidan, stated that women entrepreneurs should focus on collaboration. According to him, expansion of the market, not competition for the share of the market, is the best way for women entrepreneurs to move their businesses forward.

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Therese Canares, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, won $10,000 in Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures’ second annual “Pitch It On!” competition for female inventors. Canares received the most votes from the nearly 100 faculty, researchers, and investors who attended the Oct. 19 event, part of the AccelHERator, JHTV’s programming dedicated to female inventorship at Johns Hopkins. Canares pitched CurieDx, a digital health startup that uses machine learning to enable point-of-care testing and remote physical exams through smartphones. CurieDx’s first product is a strep throat screening tool, through which a photo of a patient’s throat is compared with a digital photo library of infected and uninfected throats to determine if the patient has the illness. The diagnosis platform can be viewed by parents, patients, physicians, and telehealth providers.

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This paper by Qualcomm outlines key findings from qualitative and quantitative data obtained from 168 women involved in academic innovation. It puts forth a set of recommendations based on the survey feedback, follow-up interviews, and the collective experience of technology transfer professionals who work daily with academic innovators. 

We trust these recommendations will provide valuable insights into concrete actions that can be taken to ensure systemic changes that will foster greater engagement of academic women and other under-represented populations in all stages of the innovation lifecycle. 

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The computer algorithm, dishwasher, fire escape, paper bag and windshield wipers are just some of the inventions women have created. Although female inventors haven’t always gotten the recognition they deserve, they’ve made an incalculable impact on modern life. Here are five female inventors whose inventions are still an important part of today’s world.

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Innovation Council has created a running list of resources on various issues related to Gender and IP, based on work by Morgan Schreur. 

Click here to see the reading list.

Research has long shown that fewer patents are awarded to women than to men. Now a new study suggests that bias is fueling disparities in biomedical innovation as well. The study, published Thursday in Science, found that female inventors are more likely to come up with biomedical ideas and products that focus on the needs of women whereas male inventors are more inclined to focus on products for men.

That, the authors concluded, suggests society may be missing out on medications, devices, and technology that could benefit women’s health.

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This analysis by the UKIPO shows that, in the 1980s, women represented less than 4% of inventors on GB patent applications, but that this has steadily risen to over 8% in recent years. Although absolute numbers remain relatively low, the last 10 years have seen a 16% increase in the proportion of female inventors. The overall proportion of patents involving a female inventor (either working alone or as part of a team) has more than tripled, from 4% in 1980 to over 12% in 2015; at the same time, the last 10 years have seen the proportion of individual female inventors’ plateau at around 3.75%. The number of all-female teams has increased fivefold since 1980, but the absolute numbers are still very low, with only 0.33% of patents coming from all-female teams in 2015. Although historical analysis reveals ever-increasing levels of female patenting, the growth rate is slow and the absolute numbers are still very low. The world of patenting remains male-dominated, and, even in 2015, there is a clear gender disparity: 88% of all GB patent applications come from male individuals or all-male teams, and almost 96% teams that submit applications include at least one man.

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The Rocky Mountain Regional U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will host the second annual Intellectual Property (IP) Patch Program, in collaboration with the Girl Scouts of Colorado.  Junior Girl Scouts are invited to come learn about inventions and patents, and to receive their IP Patch.

The program includes support for the girls’ normal school curriculum, as well as structured activities for girls of all ages.  These activities are designed to increase awareness of, and interest in, the creation and protection of intellectual property (IP) across disciplines, and particularly as it relates to the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

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Teenage female inventors from Afghanistan – Zarifa Ghafari and Aryana Saeed – are between 15 and 18 years old and have patented inventions such as a landmine detector and a low-cost ventilator. Born after the outbreak of war in Afghanistan in 2001, the girls made headlines around the world for their success as a robotics team. However, when the Taliban regained control, they had to flee their home and leave their loved ones behind to seek refuge in Qatar.

Watch their story here.

According to Silicon Valley Bank, total healthtech investment in 2020 was $15.3 billion, compared to just $10.6 billion in 2019. While healthcare deals were up across the board, a trend towards telehealth, virtual clinical trials, and other remote practices helped bring digital health to the forefront. However, many great ideas failed simply because they lacked access to knowledgeable insiders. And those experts that did exist tended to be monolithic or act as gatekeepers rather than sources of valuable guidance. Shelli Pavone founded Inlightened to help bridge that gap and break the hold of those gatekeepers. By creating a vast network of diverse healthcare experts for innovators to tap for guidance, she hopes to nudge more good ideas towards solving healthcare’s most compelling problems.

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Invent Together is a coalition of organizations, universities, companies, and other stakeholders dedicated to understanding the diversity gaps in invention and patenting. It aims to support public policy and private initiatives working to close the diversity gap. They have been supporting the adoption of the Inventor Diversity for Economic Advancement (IDEA) Act, which would require the USPTO to collect data on inventors’ demographic data on a voluntary basis and make this information available in the aggregate for research.

The IDEA Act has recently passed the House as part of the America COMPETES Act. As the House and Senate negotiate a compromise, Invent Together is calling for Congress to keep the IDEA Act in the final version sent to President Biden’s office.

Invent Together has written a sign-on letter urging congressional leadership to keep the IDEA Act in the final innovation and competition bill which can be found here.

New research from WIPO about gender representation on PCT applications reveals that China has been able to grow the quantity of women inventors at nearly double the rate of the U.S. in recent decades, with 42% female inventors in China compared to 22% in the U.S. This Fortune article from Holly Fechner, the Executive Director of Invent Together, highlights the importance of utilizing the ideas and ingenuity of female inventors as well as those from other historically underrepresented groups, especially since global competition in technology is so intense and thus the stakes are high.

Click here to read the full article.

Invent Together is a coalition of organizations, universities, companies, and other stakeholders dedicated to understanding the diversity gaps in invention and patenting, and to supporting public policy and private initiatives to close them. Closing patent gaps would have significant benefits for individual inventors and society as a whole. Research shows that inventors with patents consistently earn higher incomes on average than non-inventors, even controlling for occupation, migrant status, and other factors.

Learn more about Invent Together and find interesting research in this area here.

Invent Together, an alliance focused on broadening participation in inventing and patenting, published a new study in April, 2024 titled “The Role of Trust in Advancing Equity in Innovation.” The study highlighted trust as a pivotal factor in an individual’s decision to pursue a patent for a new product or technology. The study identified significant trust gaps among women and people of color, which deter their participation in inventing and patenting. The study deepens our understanding of the barriers to equity in innovation and underscores the urgent need to build trust within the innovation ecosystem to safeguard U.S. global technology leadership.

Click here for the official press release and full study.

Necessity is the father of invention, but where is its mother? According to a new study published in Science, fewer women hold biomedical patents, leading to a reduced number of patented technologies designed to address problems affecting women. While there are well-known biases that limit the number of women in science and technology, the consequences extend beyond the gender gap in the labour market, say researchers from McGill University, Harvard Business School, and the Universidad de Navarra in Barcelona. Demographic inequities in who gets to invent lead to demographic inequities in who benefits from invention.

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During her three decades at NASA, Dr. Valerie L. Thomas was an integral part of the early Landsat digital image processing team, developing Landsat satellites to capture multispectral images of Earth from orbit. Thomas became the go-to person to consult about Landsat data, and eventually consolidated her knowledge into a document that became indispensable for scientists using the data. Working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, she managed the development of early Landsat image processing software systems and became the resident expert on the Computer Compatible Tapes or CCTs, used to store early Landsat imagery. Thomas’s patent for the illusion transmitter was granted in 1980. Only a small fraction of United States patents belong to Black inventors, and even fewer are held by Black women. The illusion transmitter is still used by NASA today, and Thomas has imagined further applications in video, television, and even surgical imaging.

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Julio Raffo, Head of the Innovation Economy Section of the Department for Economics and Data Analytics at WIPO, and and Elodie Carpentier, a WIPO postdoc research fellow, in Sept 2022 appeared on the podcast AUTM-in-the-air, a weekly podcast that brings conversations about the impact of research commercialization and the patent and licensing professionals, innovators, entrepreneurs, and tech transfer leaders who make it happen.

The podcast discussed WIPO’s diverse range of projects, what their research has shown about the impacts of war, COVID, and climate change on the evolution of innovation, and what WIPO is doing to hasten the pace of the slowly closing gender gap in the innovation space.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

This report provides an overview of promising policies and programs for improving IP diversity, focusing on Europe. Utsav Bahl, our research associate, developed the analysis.

Across regions, women are using IP tools, such as patents, less than men. This analysis focuses on gender – but IP gaps affecting other historically underrepresented groups warrant equal attention from policymakers. Apart from identifying key policies, we note that a crucial first step is disaggregated data collection and analysis, to quantify IP gaps and identify causes, then to track progress in dismantling them over time.

This document was created as part of the initial research for a wider paper in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on increasing access to IP for women.

In her article for the International Women’s Day 2021, Carolina Torres-Sarmiento pays tribute to female inventors and their contribution to social developments, and draws attention to the glass ceilings they had to break on their way to success. Gender gaps in science and technology are, unfortunately, still very present. Data extracted from patent offices in the US and the UK, as well as the ‘She figures (2018)’ EU report, show the necessity of more equal representation in the patent system. Multiple actions can be considered, such as enhancing women’s representation in all fields of science and technology, reducing the gender gap in STEM education, encouraging female recognition in patent applications, increasing the involvement of women in business and innovation processes, and promoting awareness to prevent gender bias in emerging technologies.

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Click here through Innovation Council’s presentation on “Policy approaches to close the intellectual property gender gap”. Innovation Council’s Jennifer Brant and Mark Schultz presented the findings on 29 July during the plenary session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) hosted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Watch the full session.  The IC intervention starts at 01:38:52.