Mother of invention: Study highlights gender gap in health innovations

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Harvard Business Professor Rem Koning examines how bias harms innovation.

But three years ago, his research fell short when his wife, who had a rare postpartum disorder, couldn’t find treatments designed specifically for young mothers.

“It came out of nowhere. And it was a lot more scary than I think it should be, ”Koning told AFP about the diagnosis of postpartum preeclampsia, which is characterized by high blood pressure.

The couple were also disappointed with the quality of tech products for mothers – realizing that most medical innovations were developed by men who rejected or overlooked women’s needs.

These experiences prompted Koning to conduct a machine learning text analysis of more than 440,000 U.S. biomedical patents filed between 1976 and 2010, the results of which were published Thursday in Science magazine.

By tracking inventors’ names and associating them with patents, Koning and colleagues John-Paul Ferguson and Sampsa Samila found that patents filed by all-female teams of inventors were more than 35 percent more likely to target women’s health.

Teams that were predominantly female were 18 percent more likely to make products for women.

A biologist in the OSE Immunotherapeutics pharmaceutical laboratory is working on a program to develop a vaccine against Covid-19. PHOTO: AFP

These patents aimed to solve problems that affect women either specifically – like menopause or preeclampsia – or disproportionately like fibromyalgia.

Then there are conditions like atrial fibrillation, which affect women differently, from risk factors to symptoms to treatments.

While the influence of female innovators on women’s health products has been significant, their share has been small.

Women inventors made up 25 percent of the patents pending in the three decades analyzed – and the team estimated that if patents were invented equally during the period studied, there would be about 6,500 more women-centered inventions on the market.

“Unfortunately, previous research has shown that women are a minority of US patents, both in biomedicine and in other areas,” Koning said. “So we weren’t surprised, but still disappointed at how little the numbers have changed.”

Despite years of improvement, women make up only 27 percent of all US STEM workers, according to census data – and the gap in future products that serve women’s health needs is likely to remain.

In a similar comment, Fiona Murray, who researches Innovation and Inclusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argued that innovators from different backgrounds are seeing the blind spots in research and improving the lives and health of more people.

In 1988, for example, the African-American ophthalmologist Patricia Bath received a patent for a laser-based cataract removal system.

Not only women who suffer disproportionately from the eye disease benefited from the invention, but ultimately everyone else.

From a business perspective, a shortage of women inventors can have a negative impact on an economy that needs to recover from the effects of a global pandemic, Koning said.

“If women don’t invent or start new businesses, we lose new ideas, new technologies and end up with slower economic growth,” he said. “Not only is society losing the ideas of women, but consumers are also particularly disadvantaged.”

On the other hand, according to Koning, not all inventors are guided by gender identity, and sometimes male inventors, for example, invent products for women. Her study was also limited in its binary analysis of gender and gender.

“Unfortunately, the limitations of our data prevent us from delving deeper into the complexities of gender and gender,” he said.

source https://dailyhealthynews.ca/mother-of-invention-study-highlights-gender-gap-in-health-innovations/