Bloomberg, July 24, 2018: Black and Hispanic women are less likely to get patents than Whites
Women of color, particularly black and Hispanic women, are less likely to obtain U.S. patent rights than white women and men, even as they are leading in the growth of new female-owned businesses over the last two decades, according to a new study.
“The data show that people of color are particularly unlikely to hold intellectual property,” the Institute of Women’s Policy Research, a Washington think tank, said in a report released on Tuesday. Overall, less than 19 percent of patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had a female inventor listed, according to the most recent data, compiled in 2015.
The report found that “despite being less likely to hold intellectual property rights than men, women-owned businesses still report actively engaging in innovative activities and generally do so at rates at least as high as men-owned business.”
Women are increasingly likely to own their own businesses and women of color are playing their part in accelerating entrepreneurial activity. Firms owned by women grew from 847,000 to 1.1 million between 1997 and 2015, the study found. Moreover, the number of businesses owned by minority women accounted for more than two-thirds of the overall growth in that period, according to the study.
Yet the issue of the patent gap is “most severe for the minority groups, especially African- Americans and Hispanic women,” said Jeanne Curtis, director of the Cardozo/Google Project for Patent Diversity, a program financed in part by by Alphabet Inc.’s Google that is dedicated to increasing the number of patents issued to women and minorities.
“Innovation is how we come up with solutions to the most pressing challenges that are facing our society today,” said Jessica Milli, one of the report’s co-authors. Without input from all sexes and ethnic groups, some issues get overlooked and “you get solutions that only work for a small portion of the population.”
