The number of women being awarded U.S. patents has increased sharply in recent years, according to a private study commissioned by the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) to determine the rates of women who have applied for and received patents from 1975 through 2010. According to the NWBC’s announcement of their preliminary findings, 22,984 patents were awarded to women in 2010, up by an impressive 35% from 2009. This acceleration in the rate of patents being granted to women is impressive because in 2009, women received 17,061 patents, which was just a 4.5 percent increase over the 16,321 issued in 2008.
The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC) is a non-partisan federal advisory council created to serve as an independent source of advice and counsel to the President, Congress, and the U.S. Small Business Administration on economic issues of importance to women business owners. The goal behind the study was to measure woman ownership of intellectual property as it serves as an indicator of entrepreneurial activity and the corresponding growth of women-owned businesses. Below is a chart created by the NWBC measuring the density of women owned business in the U.S.
The method of collecting 35 years worth of patent applications is as interesting as the study’s results. Remember, patent applications don’t ask for the applicants’ gender so this kind of information was not readily accessible. In order to determine whether a patent application belonged to a woman or man, researchers had to review each patent application individually to determine the sex to which the patent applicant’s name belonged. According to the NWBC’s announcement of their new study,
NWBC researchers examined the names of all patents granted over a 35-year period, determining gender by using the applicant’s name. To do this, researchers relied upon multiple sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Social Security Administration, which compiles a list of the 10,000 most common American names for men and women. Because of the nation’s changing population demographics over the last quarter century, researchers also relied on commercially available data of the most common names in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Spanish, German and French. Uncommon names from other foreign countries, as well as unisex names, also were examined. Just under 6 percent of the names in patent disclosures could not be identified as male or female.
I wonder what the room for error was in interpreting names as those belonging to men or women. The complete study will be released during an upcoming news event at the USPTO headquarters in early March. This release corresponds with March being Women’s History Month and the NWBC’s commemoration of a 35-year history of women inventors by featuring a new female inventor every day on its website during March. To read the NWBC’s announcement of their study on women and intellectual property ownership, click here.
Tags: National Women's Business Council, patent application, women entrepreneurs
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