Scientific and Technological Performance by Gender

Abstract

The availability of sex-disaggregated data in the fields of research, technology and development is extremely important for supporting the growing political commitment to promote and monitor women participation in the different fields of S&T. During the late 1990s the European Commission identified as a priority the availability of this data. Even if scientific publications and patents are widely accepted indicators of scientific and technological performances, until now it has been impossible to measure bibliometric and patent output by gender in a large set of data. Starting from a feasibility study carried out for the European Commission on the whole set of patents published in 1998 by the European Patent Office and on 30,000 authors of items published in 1995 on scientific journals of international relevance, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to obtain robust gender indicators on S&T output.