The Distributional Politics of Inventing: Evidence from Woman's Labor Force Participation in World War II

Abstract

Technological innovations shape the distribution of power between and within societies. Invention-the first step in innovation-and recognition for inventing shape and are shaped by the distribution of power within society: society's marginalized groups face more, and potentially greater, barriers to both. In this paper, we argue that attenuating these exclusionary barriers will increase inventing but that members of dominant social groups are the primary drivers of this increase. We test our expectations by focusing on one barrier to the invention process-barriers to labor force participation-by one marginalized group-women-in the context of World War II in the United States. World War II created an exogenous need and opportunity for greater women's labor force participation due to men's mobilization. Using county-level U.S. data and a well-validated instrument of county-level factories and fatality rates, our results show that the increase in women's labor force participation during World War II is associated with a rise in the number of inventors filing patents, but patents are primarily owned by men. Female inventors initially emerge only in technologies typically associated with women's household chores, and it takes years before we observe an effect on patent publications by women in broader industries. Our findings speak to several literatures in international and comparative politics and have implications for patenting today.