Policymakers recognize that expanding the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in patenting is critical for growing and sustaining American innovation and prosperity. The challenge is that demographic characteristics of inventors such as sex at birth, gender, ethnicity, and race are not collected as part of the process of applying for or receiving a patent. Join us to learn more about how this challenge is addressed through alternative approaches, the accuracy of various approaches, and the important uses of these statistics.

At PatentsView, with our partners at the University of Bordeaux, we have identified the gender of inventors named on U.S. patents from 1976 to 2021. By using the information supplied by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) from their World Gender-Name Dictionary along with other documentation, the team was able  to infer the gender for over 92.6% of the 2 million inventors residing in the United States and 92.3% of the nearly 5 million inventors named on U.S. patents residing around the world. You can download bulk data, as well as yearly data files, with gender information according to the latest algorithms for gender attribution on our website. The desire to map who is creating the latest technology is rapidly increasing. To be certain, this exploration is a global endeavor. 

You are invited to a day-long symposium on Friday, August 26th, to learn about the latest developments for identifying and analyzing the demographics of inventors who patent. The symposium will feature experts from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, ZestAI, RAND Corporation, Rutgers University, University of Bordeaux, and WIPO. To tie everything together, a capstone panel with practitioners and leaders from the financial industry and academic institutions will share their perspectives on the research, next steps, and the overall policy relevance of knowing who drives innovation through patenting.  

To read more about each presenter and their work, and to register for this symposium, please visit the PatentsView event page at patentsview.org/events/august26-2022. See you there!