Women and Patenting in Nanotechnology: Scale, Scope and Equity

Abstract

There are many ways to determine the diversity of the nanotechnology workforce. None of them is perfect, but they can all be telling in some way. In this chapter Yu Meng and Philip Shapira delve into data in one of the areas Smith-Doerr highlights, namely, patenting. Using a comprehensive data set, these authors report the discouraging, but familiar, statistics: very few women are patenting in nanotechnology. Only 17% of the patents in their dataset had only female inventors; twice as many have only male inventors. But the gap between the two figures has gradually been closing over the period studied. Although women’s patents are broader in scope than those of male inventors, female patent applicants are concentrated in a few subfields of nanotechnology, especially those with life science connections.