Measuring scientific influence

[differenceblog]

Claire Cain Miller (2007), in Forbes, reports that gender diversity in R&D may not just be good for people, but good for companies and science in general. "Who Invents IT?", a report released this week by the National Center for Women & Information Technology, examines the relationship between IT patent-holder gender and the number of times that

Comments

[mycrust]

Is it controlled for number of inventors on the patent, though? I could imagine that more significant patents might have a longer list of inventors at these, just by chance, would be more likely to be mixed gender.

[differenceblog]

Wow... I feel silly for not having thought of that. Okay, from the report:

"One possibility for this finding may be that gender diversity leads to more innovative research and discovery. Another possibility is the size of the relative inventor teams. The female-only teams average only 1.1 inventors per patent, the male-only teams average 1.9 inventors per patent, while the mixed teams average 3.7 inventors per patent."

Earlier in the report, however, they mention that they counted fractions of patents (for example, if a patent had 2 male authors and 1 female author, they would count it as 0.33 female patents and 0.66 male patents) -- and they found that while 9% of all U.S. IT patents had at least one female author, 4.7% of fractionally attributed patent attributions were to females.

45% of all patents are attributed to a single male inventor.
1.4% of patents are attributed to a single female inventor.