Freakonomics Radio - 67. The Patent Gap

Episode Date: March 22, 2012

Women hold fewer than one in 10 patents. Why? And what are we missing out on?

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, welcome back. Thank you, Kai. I want to talk to you about this economic buzzword these days, innovation. You know, we've got to innovate our way back to greatness. Do you know who's got the most room for improvement in the innovation field?

You and me, baby. Well, that's the sad truth, isn't it? But if you look at the data on patents, okay, patent filing, it turns out that women are responsible for only about seven and a half percent of all patents filed. I mean, that's amazing. That's at least 93-something percent for men. That's ridiculous. Well, 92-something, but I know math is not your strong suit. Has to be science and engineering, right? And the lack of women therein? Yeah, that's a very sensible first thought. Not a bad one, Kai. You're doing better.

But it's a surprising fact. The fact is that even women factor is that you just don't find a lot of women in the kind of sweet spot jobs within an industry that lead to a lot of patent filing. Men are more likely to be in jobs involving design work or development work. So the D and the R and D. And even within given fields of study, women are less likely to be in those jobs. And that also reduces their patenting. Now, you know, this idea, Kai, actually explains a lot of the male-female wage gap across the board in different industries, whether it's business or medicine or education. Women end up gravitating toward the lower paying jobs within those fields. So, you know, say a general practice

physician versus a surgeon. Well, all right. So is that women being steered away from those jobs? Is that subtle discrimination or is it women making the career the bigger point that Jenny Hunt is making about the patent data is that by having such a low rate of female patenting, even within the science and engineering fields, the U.S. is missing an opportunity. So she argues that closing the male-female patenting gap in science and engineering would have a dramatic effect on the economy, that it might lift GDP per capita by as much as 2.7 percent. Wow. Which is a huge jump, given the way the economy is growing these days, or not, right? Massive. How do we get there? It's interesting. There's a lot of research showing that men are bigger risk takers than

women. Now, I talked to an economics professor in Britain. Her name is Alison Booth, and she had cooked up an experiment to look into this male-female risk gap. She randomly assigned a bunch of first-year economics students to either single-sex classes or co-ed classes. So there were all-female groups, all-male groups, and mixed, all randomly selected. Then she had each of the students take a test to determine their baseline level of risk aversion. And then after eight weeks of class, she gave all the students the same test. And here's what she learned.

We found that the girls who'd been in single-sex groups all the way through the term were behaving the same as the boys who were in single-sex groups. There was only the girls who were in the co-educational groups who were making fewer risky choices. That's amazing. Two months away from boys or men and women want more risk. Women seem to compete better when they're competing against women. And once you bring men into the equation, they kind of dial it down a little bit. That's what we're seeing in a lot of the research.

That's wild. So get me back to patents and innovation. How do we get there? Well, you know, here's one thought. If I'm a Google or a GE or the U.S. government, and I truly want to maximize my resources, really get the most out of all my employees, I might try something that's so old fashioned that it'll strike a lot of people as truly repugnant. I might actually segregate my workforce. I might actually let my sharpest women set up shop separately away from the men and just see what kind of wonderful stuff

they can produce on their own. You know, I was going to give you a hard time, but it'd be actually interesting. I don't know. Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Okay, Kai. Thanks very much.