A new study led by Jieshu Wang, assistant professor of technology and society at Stony Brook University, has documented how gender shapes the characteristics and outcomes of patented inventions, finding that although women are underrepresented among U.S. inventors, their inventions often exhibit novelty, originality, and technological generality.
For their study, Dr. Wang and her co-author, Andrew Maynard of Arizona State University, examined 3.7 million U.S. utility patents, covering 1.8 million distinct inventors and over 200,000 organizations from 1976 to 2021. Despite women accounting for 51 percent of the U.S. population and 47 percent of the U.S. workforce, only 13.1 percent of the 1.8 million U.S. patent-holders are women.
Among the 3.7 million analyzed patents, only 17.6 percent are filed with at least one woman inventor. Of those patents that do list a woman inventor, the vast majority (84.7 percent) are created by both men and women. Only 2.7 percent of the 3.7 million patents included in the study list exclusively women inventors.
Notably, the overall percentage of women inventors has grown significantly over the past five decades. In 1976, less than 2 percent of inventors were women. By 2021, this figure rose to over 12 percent. However, the pace of change has slowed in recent decades. While the share of women inventors more than doubled from 3.5 percent in 1980 to 9.1 percent in 2000, it only increased modestly from 9.1 percent to 11.8 percent between 2000 and 2020.
Dr. Wang and Dr. Maynard also found that the gender composition of inventor teams significantly influences their use of scientific knowledge and public support. On average, patents that include women inventors cite more scientific papers than male-only inventions. In contrast, all-women teams are less likely than all-male teams to receive public funding support. Notably, patents with both men and women inventors cite the most scientific papers and receive the most public funding.
When analyzing the characteristics of U.S. patents, the authors found that the inclusion of women inventors significantly increases a patent’s scope, indicating a broader technological knowledge. Patents created by women are also more likely to be novel, meaning they introduce new components or novel combinations of existing ones. Additionally, patents with women inventors exhibit greater originality, as they draw from a more diverse and wide-ranging set of prior technologies. Similar to their use of scientific knowledge and public support, mixed-gender teams are the most likely to exhibit novelty and originality, and have the broadest scope.
Despite their novelty and originality, patents that list women inventors – including both all-women teams and mixed-gender teams – receive significantly fewer citations than those created exclusively by men. However, patents with women inventors have higher generality, meaning they span a broader range of technological areas. Additionally, mixed-gender teams are more likely to produce disruptive patents, which are inventions that break with existing technologies and initiate new innovation pathways.
The study also revealed that women inventors are significantly more likely to work at universities than in government agencies or private organizations, suggesting the academic environment is the most conducive to women inventors’ success. Among specific scientific domains, women inventors have the highest participation in biotechnology.
“Ultimately, narrowing the gender gap in patenting is not only a matter of equity but also one of innovation quality and societal relevance,” the authors write. “Encouraging women’s participation in invention can enrich the diversity of ideas, broaden the reach of technological solutions, and inspire future generations of innovators. Addressing both structural and cultural barriers is essential for building a more inclusive and effective innovation ecosystem.”