Identifying the extent and causes of gender and racial disparities amongst patent recipients within the United States could help close these gaps, researchers say.
Data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) shows that fewer than 13 percent of patent holders within the U.S. were women in 2020. And black American inventors – who’re less easy to prosecute because their race just isn’t disclosed in patent applications – are thrice less more likely to be patent holders than their white counterparts, based on a December study. 2023 Article in Science Magazine.
These differences contribute to income inequality and influence who receives funding for inventions, researchers in science, business and law within the United States have found. They also influence what form of innovation is created and who advantages from it.
Jordana Goodman, an assistant professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law who studies equal opportunity in science, technology, engineering and arithmetic, points to the instance of inventors Bruce Boyd and Brigitte Gopou, whose experience may illustrate a number of the underlying aspects.
13%Percentage of girls amongst US patent holders in 2020
In 2004, Boyd and Gopou invented a hair styling tool that Subscribe to Hair sponge used to style dreadlocks. “This product lets you style very curly hair and form of get dreadlocks going,” says Goodman. “And it lets you do in minutes what used to take people hours since you needed to twist each individual piece of hair by hand.”
When the 2 sought legal advice on patenting, they were confronted with the truth that white men owned the vast majority of Majority of practitioners in the sector. In the top, Boyd and Gopou felt that their patent application “didn't necessarily highlight the novelty of their tool,” Goodman says. The patent they eventually received was “just for the tactic of using the product and never for the product itself, so it's easier for people within the United States to make knock-offs and never get into as much trouble with litigation.”
Gender- and race-based patent loopholes could hurt “international competitiveness,” says Gauri Subramani, an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The U.S. must “exploit its entire talent pool,” Subramani adds. “If you simply sample 60 percent of the population, you're missing out on things that the opposite 40 percent of the population could develop that may very well be good for the economy.”
One likely consequence of those gaps is that fewer inventions profit women and minorities. Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, used a text evaluation of all U.S. biomedical patents filed between 1976 and 2010 to indicate that inventor teams made up entirely of girls were 35 percent more more likely to give attention to women's health than teams made up entirely of men. “Who advantages from innovation depends upon who gets to invent,” Koning and co-authors wrote. in Science in June 2021.
Subramani has found that much of the gender gap may very well be closed by addressing differences between men and girls in response to the USPTO's rejection of early patent applications. She and co-authors The authors evaluated the outcomes of nearly a million patent applications filed within the United States between 2001 and 2012 and concluded that “women are less more likely to proceed with patent litigation after an early rejection.”
They added: “About half of the gender gap in patents granted during this era may be explained by women's differences of their propensity to withdraw applications.”
Applicants who’ve access to a lawyer or a company connection usually tend to stick around despite initial rejections, says Subramani. She welcomes a USPTO program that connects applicants with free legal advice.
The USPTO has increased its funding for these legal advisors by 40 percent, to $1.2 million in 2022, based on its director, Kathi Vidal. In response to a request last yr from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee about how the patent office is closing this gap, the USPTO has increased its funding for these legal advisors by 40 percent, to $1.2 million in 2022.
Generative artificial intelligence could also result in a more diverse pool of patent holders, lawyers say. Claude.ai, the massive language model of AI startup Anthropic, “already does a reasonably good job” of assessing whether a patent has been rejected based on the race of an inventor or user of an invention, says Damien Riehl.
Riehl, a technology lawyer, has launched a searchable platform for prior art patent claims called All the Patents, which goals to thwart the efforts of people to patent a murals that has already been invented and patented. He can also be involved in a legal alliance that’s developing standards for organizing and classifying legal data.
Generative AI could ultimately help the USPTO or others develop tools to assist patent applicants higher refine their applications and reply to initial rejections.
Colleen Chien, a law professor on the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of a forthcoming paper on the role of AI in improving patent quality and fairness, recommends that the USPTO work with private software firms to develop low-cost, if possible free, AI-based generative tools to assist patent seekers with limited experience with the method.
Other researchers, nonetheless, remain unconvinced that generative AI is the panacea. “I don't think technology is a solution to fix bias,” says Goodman.
Mike Teodorescu, Assistant Professor on the Information School on the University of Washington, expresses similar doubts. He examines differences in granted patents But he says he wants the effectiveness of any supposed generative AI solutions to be rigorously examined.
However, technology that helps and reduces costs for inventors who apply for patents without legal assistance will profit female applicants greater than male ones, argues Charles de Grazia, an assistant professor on the École de Management Léonard de Vinci in Paris. He is co-author, with Teodorescu, of a 2022 research paper on “Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting.” In their study, female inventors – particularly those that apply for patents without legal help – benefited about 33 percent more from the support than male ones, says de Grazia.
