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"Have women made material contributions to the sum total of creative achievements? Have they designed, devised, discovered, and invented to reduce labor, to forestall danger, disease, and death, to embellish life with creative comforts, and to enrich humanity with new stores of knowledge?"1
I. INTRODUCTION
Patents are a big business and valuable currency in our innovation-based global economy. Worldwide, more than 6.7 million patents are in force, nearly 4 million patent applications are in backlog, and upwards of 750,000 new patents are granted each year.2 The cumulative effect of these numbers is staggering, with the patent landscape becoming increasingly dense and complex, as inventors stake out, through patent claims, the metes and bounds of property rights in newly developed or improved technologies and seek the legal right to exclude others from making or using their inventions.3
The efficiency and efficacy of the U.S. patent system has been the subject of great debate in recent years. This debate stems largely from the tremendous backlog of patent applications that have amassed in the examination queue and the corresponding increase in patent application pendency.4 The growing backlog of unexamined applications and increase in application pendency has caused patent-related data to be closely scrutinized. Statistics on patent activity published annually by organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are voluminous.5 Substantial effort is invested in collecting, analyzing, and annually reporting an abundance of detailed statistics across a multitude of variables. This data is highly useful for monitoring many of the trends in intellectual property (IP) activity and in understanding the role of IP in stimulating and diffusing innovation; however, despite the plethora of patent-related data readily available for public consumption, the statistics report comparatively little about the inventors behind the patents and even less about the subcategory of female inventors.6
Although we count, measure, and compare data on patents, and voraciously debate patent theory and doctrine, we do not analyze, nearly to the same extent, inventor demographics in order to understand how inventor participation in the patent system is influenced by gender,7 race, age, educational background, and other identity characteristics and, more broadly, how the composition of the inventor community impacts systemic innovation outcomes.8
In studying patenting...