Patents and Gender: A Big Data Analysis of 15 Years of Australian Patent Applications

Abstract

Recent recommended changes to Australia’s patent laws could narrow the scope of patentable inventions. We argue this could have a comparatively bigger impact on female inventors who we find clustered in the life sciences. We examine 309,544 patent applications filed with IP Australia (the majority from international applicants) across a 15-year period (2001–15) and attribute a gender to 941,516 inventor names. Only 23.6% of patent applications in this dataset include at least 1 female inventor. The average overall success rate irrespective of gender was 75.0%, but the odds of success increased with increasing numbers of male inventors on a team. The addition of female inventors to a team did not have the same effect. We propose that the gender disparity could arise from implicit gender effects (examiner or patentee) during patent prosecution. https://www.unswlawjournal.unsw.edu.au/article/patents-and-gender-a-big-data-analysis-of-15-years-of-australian-patent-applications

Keywords: patents, gender, empirical, Australia, bias

JEL Classification: K, I, C