Data and Code for: Inventor Gender and the Direction of Invention

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Rembrand Koning, Harvard Business School; Sampsa Samila, IESE Business School; John-Paul Ferguson, McGill University, Desautels Faculty of Management

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
README.pdf	application/pdf	18.4 KB	08/27/2020 12:21:PM
README.txt	text/plain	1.3 KB	08/27/2020 12:20:PM
inventor_gender_koning_analysis.do	text/x-stata-syntax	24.2 KB	08/27/2020 12:43:PM
mesh_category_year_level2.dta	application/x-stata	565.6 KB	08/27/2020 12:22:PM
mesh_category_year_level3.dta	application/x-stata	1.8 MB	08/27/2020 11:57:AM
mesh_category_year_level4.dta	application/x-stata	1.1 MB	08/27/2020 11:57:AM

Project Citation:

Koning, Rembrand, Samila, Sampsa , and Ferguson, John-Paul. Data and Code for: Inventor Gender and the Direction of Invention. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2020. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-09-10. https://doi.org/10.3886/E120799V1

Project Description

Summary: We study whether increasing the share of female inventors leads to more biomedical inventions that focus on the needs of women. After accounting for detailed disease-technology, disease-year, and technology-year fixed effects, we find that a 10 percentage-point increase in the share of female inventors in a research area yields 1.2 percentage points more female-focused patents. Notably, this effect only holds for female-led invention teams. Areas with a greater share of female inventors in supporting roles do not produce more female-focused inventions. For gender to impact the direction of invention, it appears that women must occupy positions of power.

Funding Sources: E.U. Horizon 2020 research Marie Sk􏰀lodowska-Curie (799330); Harvard Business School

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: patents; innovation; gender; medical technology

JEL Classification:
      J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
      O31 Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
      O34 Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1976 – 2010

Data Type(s): aggregate data; observational data; program source code

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Published Versions

V1 [2020-09-10]

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