ISTOCK, OLIVIER LE MOAL
Women inventors have less success than men at each step of the patent application process in the U.S., according to a study published this month (April 5) in Nature Biotechnology. A review of more than 2 million submissions to the US Patent and Trademark Office finds that, regardless of the field, processing times are slower, rejection rates are higher, and the scope of the patent ends up narrower for filings coming from women than from men.
“The extent to which women are facing tougher hurdles is relatively small at every stage,” says study coauthor Olav Sorenson, a professor at the Yale School of Management. “[But] those are going to add up and mean that the [overall] disparities . . . are going to be much ...
