‘Jessica less likely to get a patent than Jake’: study reveals bias
Women and minority inventors are not only less likely to apply for patents, but they’re also less likely to have their applications granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office than white men, according to a study from the University of Georgia.
The research, which was co-led by Mike Schuster, assistant professor of legal studies at the Terry College of Business, looked at nearly four million patent applications between 2000-2015.
To conduct the research, the team looked at birth certificate records to calculate the percentage likelihood that a first or middle name would be associated with a particular gender and used a database developed by Kostas Tzioumis at the American College of Greece, which classifies the racial aspects of first names.
Schuster added: “Jessica is less likely to get a patent than Jake. We were interested in whether this bias came from the application itself or in the patent office.”
Subsequently, the team conducted a secondary analysis, which compared grant rates for female or minority applications whose demographic information was apparent from their name against those whose name was not race or gender identifying.
This analysis confirmed prior work, which showed that female applicants whose gender was obvious are less likely to secure a patent. But, the same was not true for minority inventors—minority inventors with race-neutral or white-sounding names weren’t more likely to secure a patent.
Looking at global applications across the world, applicants with names associated with racial minorities in the US were less likely to succeed, alongside anyone who filed an application from outside of the US.
In domestic applications, black and Hispanic applicants had a negative bias, but Asian applicants had a slight positive bias.
Finally, the team looked at an additional negative bias for those who identified as both a minority and a woman—there wasn’t an added bias across the board, but the team did note that they saw some interactions between race and gender which will require further study.
Schuster explained that while there isn’t definite evidence that implicit bias exists from the gender side, there is some bias being introduced.
He added: “The good thing is that, if implicit biases are influencing patent examination, they can be mitigated through training and thinking about how we make decisions.”
In 2019, the USPTO reported that women inventors make up just 12% of all patent inventors in the country.
The report also cited data from 2016, which indicated that African-Americans and Hispanics are “significantly underrepresented” in the patent system, with US-born black or African-American people constituting just 0.3% of inventors and Hispanic-Americans making up just 1.4% of inventors.
“If we’re not engaging the entire population of the country in the innovative landscape, we’re leaving an awful lot on the table,” said Schuster.
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