Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making waves in every corner of the world, and women are playing a significant role in this revolution, especially in the field of biotechnology AI, according to a recent study published in Nature. The study, titled Discovering value: women’s participation in university and commercial AI invention, used PatentsView data to identify the gender of inventors before using World Intellectual Property Organization categories to determine which patents contain AI. 

It was written by Alexander Giczy, Nicholas Pairolero, and Andrew Toole.

More Women are Participating in AI Innovation

The study found that women are making significant contributions to AI innovation, but there is still work to be done to ensure that people from many different backgrounds are participating in the development of AI.

The authors analyzed the women as inventors rate (WIR), which is a measure of the number and share of people receiving patents who are women. They found that the overall number of women inventors who received AI-related patents has increased from around 500 per year in 1995 to around 9,000 in 2020. The WIR for AI inventions increased from 10.1% to 12.6% in the same time frame.

“These results show that women are not only participating in AI invention but are doing so at a slightly higher rate than in non-AI technologies,” the authors said in the study.

They found differences in the AI WIR based on sector (e.g., AI and biotechnology), and whether the inventors worked for companies or universities.

The Value of Women Inventors

The authors noted research showing that diverse teams are more likely to improve innovation and business performance by looking at problems from different perspectives. Testing that theory, they found that teams with a higher proportion of women tended to be associated with higher economic value of granted patents. 

“While such an analysis does not imply causation, the value of the patent is higher for teams with relatively more women: a patent with an equal number of male and female inventors has a value approximately $1.038 million higher than a patent with all-male inventors,” the authors said in the study.

How PatentsView Can Help

This study contributes to a growing body of research that shows how important diversity is for innovation and emerging technologies. To thrive and grow in the future, everyone must be able to participate in innovation and patenting, regardless of their background. Tools like PatentsView can help us track our progress and identify areas where we can improve.

You can explore more on this topic on PatentsView’s Gender & Innovation and AI & Innovation pages.

In 1986, Patricia Bath filed for a medical patent for a novel method to remove eye cataracts. Bath was the first African American female physician to acquire a patent. Her patent has been referenced  over 100 times since its filing and has been cited as recently as February 2022 by Gregg Scheller and Matthew N. Zeid in their steerable laser probe patent.  

The patent data alone will not tell you that Bath was the first African American female physician to acquire a patent. The race of inventors, like gender, is not part of any data collected by the USPTO and would require attribution algorithms similar to the gender attribution currently conducted by the PatentsView team.  

Dig Deeper into Patent Data 

PatentsView provides an opportunity to look at women in innovation more broadly. With PatentsView’s bulk downloads data, you can now query the data to see counts and types of inventions by male and female inventors in the aggregate.  

Last Fall, PatentsView hosted a symposium on the attribution of demographic information to inventors listed on patents with the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. This symposium included updates on predicting gender and race using artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches, as well as insights on economic implications of these predictions to innovation policy.  

These methods show how researchers can dig deeper into the data to reveal trends and opportunity gaps for inventors and entrepreneurs.  

Looking Toward the Future 

The breadth of PatentsView’s mission has evolved as the project matures. Beginning in 2012 with an endeavor to connect and show the work of unique inventors over time and place, the PatentsView project has expanded the scope of its connection and discernment efforts to the assignees, locations, attorneys, and gender of inventors involved in patenting the country’s latest innovations.  

With the pursuit of disambiguation algorithms becoming more advanced in what they can identify from publicly available information on inventors and their patents, there is a need to consider the methods and implications for this line of inquiry.  

For gender attribution, the algorithm assigns the likelihood of the inventor being “male” based on the person’s name and their location in the world. The other options for the inventor are “not male,” aka female in this dichotomous view of gender, and “unassignable,” meaning that the algorithm was not able to confidently assign male or not-male to the inventor.  

A similar method could be applied to the likelihood of an inventor being of a certain race, nationality, or ethnicity. There are a variety of algorithms available using numerous different methodologies and each has unique advantages and disadvantages in terms of accuracy, expense, and time.  

What do you think about the future of race attribution in innovation? Tell us in the forum.