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Male: I’m Duncan Kirby, and today we are looking at gender equality in the intellectual property world of patents. A recent study on gender bias in technology looked at outcomes of patent applications in Australia and found that having a female-sounding first name seemed to affect the chances of securing a patent. The Australian researchers analysed 309,544 patent applications submitted between 2001 and 2015 and categorised close to one million inventors’ names based on whether they sounded male or female. They found that having a male-sounding first name increased the chances of securing a patent. Clearly, this gender bias can have serious implications for women’s careers as well as anti-discrimination policies in the fields of technology, science, and engineering. But what’s causing it? Reporter Sandra Shelby has more on this.

Female: Thank you, Duncan. Patents are granted in 35 technical fields and the researchers found that more than 60% of female inventors were grouped together in just four of these 35 fields. These four fields are all in the life science category. It’s very hard to get a patent in these fields compared to others, but after using statistics to control for this effect, they still found a gender gap – male-named inventors simply did better than female-named inventors.

Male: Sandra, that’s very interesting. I imagine getting a patent can be important for career progression as well as for securing investment for more research?

Female: Definitely, Duncan. But there are other implications as well. For one, patents with female inventors are more likely to focus on diseases affecting women, so there’s an issue of female health. And research has also shown a lack of female inventors today impacts the rate at which girls desire to become the inventors of tomorrow.

Male: That’s quite important. So, do the researchers think there is gender bias at the patent office?

Female: Well, they don’t know for sure, but they have said they don’t believe it’s a simple case of gender bias…. They think it’s more complex and likely related to the traditional biases that hold back women’s progress in the sciences more generally. They also think country and cultural differences may be an issue, because more than 90% of patent applications in Australia come from non-Australian inventors. In fact, they are largely from the United States.

Male: Well, the first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging it exists. Hopefully this research starts a conversation for people to reflect on their own biases. Thank you, Sandra.