Where the Gender Gap Meets Academic Patenting: An Empirical Study

The gender gap in academia has long been the focus of public
discourse regarding the role of academic institutes in promoting
social values. Integrating women into senior academic positions,
especially in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics) fields, is an essential aspect of promoting women's
advancement in society in general, and it also has significant
implications on female entrepreneurial and innovative potential.
In this study, we seek to assess the gender gap in the Israeli academy
by examining the nature and extent of women's participation in
transferring knowledge from the academy to the industry. One of the
most prominent models for such transfer of knowledge is based on
the registration of patents for inventions developed by academic
institutes in the course of their activities. Academic patenting is thus
a significant component of the professional activities of faculty
members worldwide. Yet, female academic patenting has received
little attention thus far.
The Israeli academy serves as an important case study for
examining female academic patenting because Israel is not only a
world leader in scientific research, but it also has an ongoing
technology transfer tradition that began in the early 1960's; and
because Israel is a small country, it is possible to conduct a
comprehensive study, examining all patent applications filed by
academic institutes since the State's establishment in 1948. In this
study, we examine the extent to which women participate in patent
filing activity in Israeli academic institutes as compared to men. Our
comparative examination is anchored in a quantitative analysis of
inventors' names indicated in patent applications filed by academic
institutes in Israel. The study then examines the gender of the named
inventors when controlling for various other characteristics of
patent applications, such as rates of acceptance for registration,
fields of research, forward citations, and more.
Our study yielded several key findings. We found that women file
patent applications far less than men. Our database included 6825
patent families, out of which 320 applications were filed by women
inventors only, 3607 applications were filed by men only, and 2898
applications were filed by mixed inventor groups comprising both
male andfemale inventors. These data alone demonstrate a gender
disparity in patenting activity in the Israeli academy. A thorough
examination of the gender composition of mixed-group patent
applications shows further that women are outnumbered by men in
joint applications naming inventors of both genders. The study also
found that women's involvement in patenting activity in the
academic sector is significantly lower than men's, considering
women's representation in STEMfaculties in Israel. We found that
while the share ofpatent applications filed by men was higher than
their representation in academic positions, the share of patent
applications filed by women was much lower than their
representation in academic positions. For instance, the study found
that in the years 2017-2018, women patented at about 35% of the
rate at which men patented. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals that
applications naming male, female, and mixed-group inventors have
comparable acceptance rates, and that there is no meaningful
gender-based distinction when it comes to the scientific filed of the
invention or forward citations.
The importance of this study is that it reveals that even when it
appears that women are successfully engaged in academic activityi.e., they have been appointed to the senior faculty in STEMfieldsthere remains a significant gap in terms of the activities that women
and men pursue. Moreover, our results suggest that women have not
achieved their full potential for invention and knowledge transfer in
the STEMfields, resulting in potential economic and social losses to
society.
Our findings can serve as a springboard for further in-depth
research on various aspects of women's integration in academia to
identify failures in achieving gender equality that may be masked by
women's increasing representation on various faculties. As the
results of our study make clear, equality in academia is not merely
a question of how many women are academic faculty members, but
also of whether female faculty can and do participate in their
institution's patenting and other important research activities at
rates similar to that of their male colleagues.