Quantifying Patenting by Women in the US, 1845–1924

Abstract

Abstract US patents do not report inventors’ gender, requiring researchers to infer the gender of inventors. To conduct these inferences, researchers must make several choices. We show how these researcher choices can affect conclusions about the role of women inventors in the US from 1845 to 1924. More specifically, we compare two automated methods to determine inventor gender for US patents at scale: inferring gender from inventors’ first names and linking inventors to census data. These methods paint similar pictures about aggregate patterns of patenting by women, but often give different predictions about the gender of particular inventors. Both automated methods identify a larger number of patents by women inventors than have previously been identified in the literature. Using the gender inferred by these two methods, we produce stylized facts about how the characteristics of patents and inventors differ by gender and over time.