It’s no secret that women are underrepresented as patent inventors in the United States. Institutional structures and biases, including patent education gaps, status hierarchy, and monetary incentives, contribute to the gender patent gap. Unfair inventorship attribution decisions create cumulative disadvantages in employment, tenure, and status. TTOs can help do something about it, and later in this article we’ll list seven concrete steps that can be taken in the form of data collection and metrics to quantify the problem, patent education, and altering internal processes for disclosing inventions and obtaining patents.

The systematic under-recognition of women in science is known as the “Matilda effect” and has two potential causes: either women are not doing as much inventive work, or they are not being publicly credited for their inventive work as much as their male colleagues.¹ Both are causes for concern.

Despite representing 29% of the STEM workforce in the U.S., women represent only 12.8% of all U.S. patent inventors. In academia and industry, attribution decisions are made in a largely self-regulating system, with little third-party oversight to ensure fairness. Minoritized communities of scientists are often subject to unfair attribution decisions due to this lack of oversight, coupled with discriminatory tactics, systemic biases, and institutional structures that reduce inventive potential. Unfair allocation of credit can impact tenure, promotion, hiring practices, and results in other cumulative disadvantages. It is important to implement institutional structures to combat the growing and pervasive “credit gap.”

There are many potential contributing factors behind this persistent inequity. ​​Ego, bias, knowledge imbalances, and monetary incentives can create environments conducive to disparate patent inventorship representation. Women might not get equal work in the laboratories because of perceived biases in competency or reliability. If they do equal work, power imbalances and disparate intellectual property education may prevent some from receiving credit because they either don’t know how to advocate for their rights or have no viable option to advocate.

Without institutional level checks and balances, more sinister reasons can emerge and true inventors may be left uncredited or under-credited — which can come back to bite the university. Recently, for example, the University of Missouri-Kansas City gave $1.4 million of a $6.45 million settlement to Dr. Kishore Cholkar after a faculty member failed to include his graduate student, Dr. Cholkar, as a co-inventor on his patents.² Lack of oversight and significant monetary incentives can establish conditions for professors to ignore the inventorship attribution rights of their students.

Institutional issues

The credit gap can in part be attributed to institutional structures. Due to prescriptive stereotypes, women and people of color face a disparity in work assignments, manifesting in fewer developmental and promotional opportunities. Moreover, if a greater percentage of a scientist’s day is spent on “office housework,” they will have fewer hours to contribute inventive ideas and conduct experiments.

The patent education gap exacerbates this. Not everyone in STEM is equally educated on topics like the importance of pursuing a patent, knowing what is patent-eligible, or how to apply for a patent. A July 2021 study recognized that many women feel they lack both basic knowledge about patents and where to acquire resources about patenting.³ This creates an intimidating system, where women are less familiar with the patent process than their male counterparts and, therefore, may be less likely to utilize the system.

Status hierarchy also affects collaborative experiences in potentially inventive ventures, impacting both individual performance and perception of that performance. Competence bias, where women — and especially women of color — must provide more evidence of competence than their male peers, can impact work assignments, idea contributions, and overall job recognition.

These and other biases are exacerbated in patent inventorship recognition. Unlike co-authors of a research paper, who can be credited for significant participation in a wide variety of areas — including data analysis or manuscript editing — a patent inventor should only be credited if they contributed to the conception of the invention. That contribution could be as small as a single comment, but it must be recognized. A person declaring inventorship may overlook contributions of their co-inventors and fail to list them as inventors, especially if they conflate the significant contribution requirement for authorship with the conception contribution for inventorship.

In addition to inventorship recognition — which may or may not be looked favorably upon in academia — patents are associated with a royalty reward typically shared among all contributing inventors on the patent. This creates a potential incentive for a bad actor to overlook co-inventors and increase their own royalty payment share.

How TTOs can help

Tech transfer offices can remedy patent inventorship gaps in several ways:

1. Create an Inventorship Equity Metric. Create a monitorable, manageable inventorship equity metric. Monitor, disseminate, and evaluate the resulting inventorship equity metric trends concurrently with policy changes to determine effective equity policies.
2. Implement New Policies. Implement policies to reduce institutional structures and biases inhibiting equitable inventorship. For example, departments and laboratories can look at equitably balancing the “office housework” amongst laboratory members. They can also implement requisite bias training, reminding professors that underrepresented students may be inadvertently overlooked in the patent process. Universities can also regularly compare demographics of hiring rates and invention rates in laboratories to pinpoint inequitable laboratory practices. They could disclose these statistics to heads of laboratories as a further potential bias reminder.
3. Conduct Data-Driven Diversity Assessments. Initiate data-driven assessments of patent inventor diversity and impacts of initiatives to increase that diversity. Campuses may already collect diversity and inclusion data. TTOs can determine if the data collection procedures sufficiently quantify inventorship disparities and, if necessary, request to revise the procedures.
4. Publish Collected Data. Publish data-driven assessments to help others. Remember we’re in this together. Research successful inventor equity initiatives and collaborate to develop new strategies to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. If the TTO is collecting data, share it with other offices and professional organizations.
5. Educate on Patents. Regularly provide general patent education to the entire potential inventor base, not just the inventors who come to the TTO. All lab members should be educated on invention disclosure, the patent system, and the process of applying for a patent. Members should all have opportunities to invent and receive rightful credit and royalties. Technology managers might ask, when planning their rounds to labs or receiving visitors, if there are others who should be included in the discussion to ensure their education efforts reach the greatest number of potential inventors.
6. Recognize Inventors. Foster a greater awareness of inventor recognition to ensure co-inventors who made an inventive contribution are not missed. Ideally, the principal investigator or other person disclosing an invention would properly credit every inventor on every patent application and disclosure form.
7. Revise Invention Disclosure and Patent Processes. Streamline the invention disclosure form and patent process to make it as easy and accessible as possible. Facilitate an easier process for disclosing inventors and obtaining patents. Verify that all inventors know and are reminded about the invention disclosure process. Give specific examples and testimonials, showing that the process should be utilized by all eligible employees and students. Include definitions about what constitutes inventorship and an inventive contribution and include a list of FAQs for potentially interested inventors. Add more lines or fields to encourage people to list all inventors in the initial disclosure process. If possible, voluntarily collect data about the race and gender of inventors and potential inventive population to assist in the data-driven diversity assessments. Finally, try to follow up with those inventors who accessed the invention disclosure form but didn’t fill it out correctly or didn’t finish the process. They may need more guidance.

Devising an equity metric

Many TTOs collect data comprising simple counts of inventions disclosed, patents filed, and licenses executed, but they need to look further into the data to understand who discloses inventions. A good start would be to compare departmental representation with inventor representation to quantify inventorship disparities in those departments.

A monitorable and manageable inventorship equity metric quantifies the patent credit disparity. The metric compares similar representative populations, such as full-time graduate students at a university to full-time graduate student inventors. Comparing similar employment populations increases the likelihood the under-credited individuals are either not being assigned the same type of work or not being equitably credited for their work, rather than simply working different jobs.

Tracking the demographics of the eligible inventive population and inventors can serve as a monitorable and manageable metric. Figure 1, for example, highlights the nationwide inventorship gender equity gap by comparing the relative representation of those working in STEM professions to inventorship from 1970-2019. TTOs could collect and compare similar data for their campus.

Institutions can use this metric to track the success of their diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts. By comparing the representative population of the university’s STEM employees and students to the inventorship population, universities can quantify underrepresentation of inventors relative to the population present at their university. This targets the area of the “leaky pipeline” that the university and TTO can impact, rather than a metric which aggregates all areas of the STEM gap.

Publication of data that quantifies inequities, such as a TTO’s inventorship equity metric, would highlight effective and non-effective DEIB efforts, enabling institutions with limited resources to not unwittingly duplicate unsuccessful inclusion experiments.

Education and outreach

​​In addition to creating and disseminating equity metrics, to create more equitable opportunities institutions can purposefully and widely disseminate invention disclosure and patent knowledge through educational programs, departmental outreach, and accessible office hours.

Though policies and procedures are routinely published on university websites, that does not mean the information is accessible. If someone doesn’t know their rights — that they are an inventor, that their invention is patentable, that they are entitled to pursue a patent — they won’t find the website, seek out the invention disclosure guidelines, or read royalty distribution policies. They may be satisfied with publishing their thesis or receiving co-authorship for a published work, but that satisfaction may stem from a lack of knowledge of all available options, rather than a thorough assessment and decision-making process.

Structural obstacles and power dynamics within university settings can also impede equitable participation. If a professor does not want to pursue a patent on a student’s invention, the student may forego their right — especially if the professor controls whether the student graduates or receives a PhD.

To combat both of these obstacles, TTOs can increase outreach. They can visit labs and classrooms regularly, educate students and professors about the patent process, and establish resources to ensure power dynamic struggles are amicably resolved.

Redesigning the invention disclosure form and processes can also help to negate implicit and explicit biases contributing to the gender gap. Small changes, such as reminding the group leader about their biases when listing potential inventors, may reduce the impact of their bias. Institutions could also create pre-populated forms to increase inventor disclosure compliance. Creating a more accessible invention disclosure system might include defining terms and using more equitable language to encourage invention disclosure by a broader population.

Future work will determine whether proposed changes, such as increasing patent education, changing the patent application process, and reminding applicants of their biases, will increase equitable inventorship and inventorship diversity. Publishing, sharing, aggregating, and analyzing data will help to track the rate of closing the credit gap and the efficacy of DEIB efforts.

Contact Goodman at jordi@bu.edu; contact Giegerich at egiegerich@berkeley.edu.

References

1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq5927
2. https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2021/02/04/umkc-dry-eye-treatment-settlement.html
3. https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Tackling-the-Gender-and-Racial-Patenting-Gap_FINAL38.pdf