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Closing the gender gap in patent filing
Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner on one scientifically-proven way that helps women embrace risk.
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Kai Ryssdal: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It's that moment every two weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, welcome back.
Stephen Dubner: Thank you, Kai. I want to talk to you about this economic buzzword these days -- innovation. You know, we've got to innovate our way back to greatness. Do you know who's got the most room for improvement in the innovation field?
Ryssdal: You and me, baby.
Dubner: That's the sad truth, isn't it? But if you look at the data on patents, patent filing, it turns out that woman are responsible for only about 7.5 percent of all patents filed.
Ryssdal: That's amazing. It leaves 93-something percent for men. That's ridiculous.
Dubner: Well, 92 something. But you know, math is not your strong suit.
Ryssdal: All right. I'm a history guy, not a math guy. It has to be science and engineering, right? And the lack of women therein.
Dubner: Yeah, that's a very sensible first thought, not a bad one, Kai. You're doing better. But it's a surprising fact. The fact is that even women with science and engineering degrees aren't much more likely to file a patent than women with other degrees. Now Jenny Hunt, who's an economist at Rutgers, she says that one big factor is you just don't find a lot of women in the kind of sweet-spot jobs within an industry that lead to a lot of patent filing.
Jenny Hunt: Men are more likely to be in jobs involving design work or development work. So the "D" in the R&D. And even within given fields of study, women are less likely to be in those jobs and that also reduces their patenting.
Now this idea, Kai, actually explains a lot of the male-female wage gap across the board in different industries -- whether it's business or medicine or education. Women end up gravitating toward the lower-paying jobs within those fields. So, say, a general practice physician versus a surgeon.
Ryssdal: All right. So is that women being steered away from those jobs,is that subtle discrimination? Or is it women making the career and family choice that men seldom make? I mean, there's a lot going on, right?
Dubner: It is all of the above, certainly. Probably most of the latter. A lot of it is by choice, but not all of it. Some of it is discrimination. But the bigger point that Jenny Hunt is making about the patent data is that by having such a low rate of female patenting -- even within the science and engineering fields -- the U.S. is missing an opportunity. She argues that closing the male-female in science and engineering would have a dramatic effect on the economy. That it might lift GDP per capita by as much as 2.7 percent.
Ryssdal: Wow, which is a huge jump given the way the economy is growing these days -- or not.
Dubner: Massive.
Ryssdal: How do we get there?
Dubner: It's interesting. There's a lot of research showing that men are bigger risk takers than women. Now, I talked to an economics professor in Britain. Her name is Alison Booth. She had cooked up an experiment to look at this male-female risk gap. She randomly assigned a bunch of first-year economic students to either single-sex classes or co-ed classes. So there were all female groups, all male groups, and mixed -- all randomly selected. Then she had each student take a test to determine risk aversion. And then after eight weeks of class, she gave all the students the same test. And here's what she learned:
Alison Booth: We found that the girls who'd been in single-sex groups all the way through the term were behaving the same as the boys who were in single-sex groups. So it was only the girls who were in the co-educational group who were making fewer risky choices.
Ryssdal: That's amazing. Two months away from boys or men, and women want more risk.
Dubner: Women seem to compete better when they're competing against women. And once you bring men into the equation, they kind of dial it down a little bit. That's what we're seeing in a lot of the research.
Ryssdal: That's wild. So get me back to patents and innovation. How do we get there?
Dubner: Well, here's one thought: if I'm a Google or a GE of the U.S. government and I truly want to maximize my resources, really get the most out of all my employees, I might try something that's so old-fashioned that it will strike a lot of people as repugnant.
Ryssdal: I know where you're going.
Dubner: I might actually segregate my workforce. I might actually let my sharpest women set up shop separately away from the men and just see what kind of wonderful stuff they can produce on their own.
Ryssdal: You know, I was going to give you a hard time, but it'd be actually interesting. I don't know. Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. We'll see you in a couple of weeks.
Dubner: OK Kai. Thanks very much.
This research agenda combines sensible, even insightful premises and findings, along with ominous nods toward a kind of misguided social engineering.
It is certainly plausible, even probable, that women behave less adventurously in the presence of men. We know that men are more responsive to status cues than women, and it stands to reason that at least a certain segment of women will tone down their competitiveness in the former's presence.
But the inference that some of these researchers seem to draw---that we are suffering terribly from a social shortage of female innovation, is a huge stretch, and highly unlikely. (How long will it be before Congress mandates or at least subsidizes sex-segregated workplaces, in order to help "level the playing field" for creativity?) For one thing, there has rarely if ever been a society that has bent over backwards more than our own in steering women into creative and productive fields of all kinds---emphatically including those conducive to patents. The horrible indignities visited against women interested in math, science, and engineering happened for sure, and were repugnant. But they don't characterize contemporary society or business.
For another, we also know that men are about four times more likely than women to end up on the cognitive tails for certain measurable conditions---such as being morons, sufferers from autism, or geniuses. Far and away the more likely explanation for any residual differences in patent-generation between the sexes---in addition to the factors already mentioned by Ryssdal and Dubner---lies here, in differential dispositions towards thinking way outside the box. To say this, it should be obvious, isn't to bring any particular credit or discredit or moral approbation or moral opprobrium to either of the two sexes---they are who they are, for complex reasons that we are beginning slowly and fitfully to understand. But in our fevered ideological environment, these unobjectionable remarks of mine will probably be taken as a lethal offense of some sort.
Tant pis, as Voltaire might have said!
One difficulty facing inventors of both genders is that once a patent is filed, major companies refuse to look at it. A typical public policy on unsolicited ideas can be found on the Apple website
http://www.apple.com/legal/policies/ideas.html. Apple is not alone in this policy. Many major companies take similar positions. Thus an inventor who is not part of a major company has a very difficult time in finding an outlet for his/her ideas even when they would of great benefit to the industries for which they were developed.
1. Think: Inventions, innovations require (among other things) creativity. Women getting along in MAN's world requires a lot of their (women's) creativity. Some of our energy and ingenuity is spent siply on survival (in some sense, anyway).
2. Over my long teaching career I (math and physics) I found that I was more of an exception as I encouraged female students to compete and to excel. Not only encouragement was absent, but girls were often discourage by adults, family, even teachers (to cultivate the kind of thinking that goes into these areas).
3. More over, and I find this in physical activities as well, bullying and sarcasm playes a role. Physically speaking the male dominates and that is OK, but it is not everything. We all need to recognize and give credit to qualities that both genders possess.
Interesting concept - "Women end up gravitating toward the lower-paying jobs..." hmmm, seems like the gravitational pull might be ON women rather than BY women, due to factors such as few childcare resources, workplace inflexibility for mothers, unequal pay and opportunities, gender bias (ah, the stories this 60-something could tell!), etc., etc.
How do we as women strike the balance between creativity and productivity in the present moment, while working to build a future that is more equitable for women; for our daughters and granddaughters.
This story had me sputtering and muttering; the easy answers about the gender gap do no good to anyone. Let's hear it for a less flip, more in depth treatment of how we can increase the creativity and innovation in our culture, through support of both sexes, not the easy-to-write smartie tone of the freakonomics story of today's show.
I take issue with the statement that "Two months away from boys or men, and women want more risk:" You are ignoring the Professor Booth's statement that the risk acceptance level remained the SAME for the men and women in segregated classes. Only the women in the co-ed class showed a LOWERED risk. In other words, when women were in class with men, they took fewer chances. When separated, women and men demonstrate no gender-based difference in risk aversion. I know that my women's college produces a (vastly) disproportionate number of women with PhDs in the sciences, so I am not surprised. Our education system continue to reward boys who are assertive (and risk takers) and girls who are quiet and risk averse. As the mother of two boys, I work to find a middle ground.
As the first woman to have a patent granted at what used to be the only US cell phone manufacturer nearly 3 decades ago, this story hits close to home. I doubt simply segregating engineers would change the result of few patents granted to women. You have to understand the structure of companies, the power of patent committees, and how one receives the honor of serving on a committee to know the barriers that patent disclosures face. I once had a patent disclosure rejected by a committee. The research director who hired me and paid my salary subsequently vowed to "ram this disclosure through the patent committee". Roughly 10 years after I was granted the patent, the company honored it as one of a group of "essential GSM patents" (implied that competitors were paying to use it). Patent committees make subjective decisions and they are not always the best. There is certainly nothing that prevents them from bias. Not every woman has a male boss who goes to bat for her ideas and it is tiring, discouraging, and wasteful to be forever setting oneself up for rejection. I don't know if there is gender bias on patent committees or not but there is no mechanism to prevent it. I left the company with 8 patents. My husband left the same company having worked primarily in the same organization as I for a similar amount of years and he had over 40 patents.
