Women engage in less commercial patenting and invention than do men, which may affect what is invented. Using text analysis of all U.S. biomedical patents filed from 1976 through 2010, we found that patents with all-female inventor teams are 35% more likely than all-male teams to focus on women’s health. This effect holds over decades and across research areas. We also found that female researchers are more likely to discover female-focused ideas. These findings suggest that the inventor gender gap is partially responsible for thousands of missing female-focused inventions since 1976. More generally, our findings suggest that who benefits from innovation depends on who gets to invent.

与男性相比，女性参与的商业专利申请和发明较少，这可能会影响发明内容。通过对 1976 年至 2010 年提交的所有美国生物医学专利的文本分析，我们发现全女性发明团队的专利比全男性团队更关注女性健康的可能性高 35%。这种效应持续数十年，跨越研究领域。我们还发现，女性研究人员更有可能发现以女性为中心的想法。这些发现表明，自 1976 年以来，数以千计的以女性为重点的发明的缺失，部分原因在于发明者的性别差距。更一般地说，我们的研究结果表明，谁从创新中受益取决于谁开始发明。