Too few women get to invent — that’s a problem for women’s health

MacArthur Genius and MIT Professor Linda Griffith has built an epic career as a scientist and inventor, including developing a human ear on a mouse. Today she spends her days deciphering the biological mechanisms of endometriosis, a disease in which uterine-like tissue grows outside the uterus. Endometriosis can be brutally painful, is regularly misdiagnosed and misunderstood, and has affected Griffith’s life along with the lives of over 6 million other women in the United States

Griffith’s research and inventions have the potential to dramatically improve women’s health. The problem for women is that she stands out for another reason: she’s feminine. In 2020, only 12.8% of U.S. inventors who were granted patents were women, and in the past, male researchers have ignored conditions like endometriosis.

Male researchers tend to downplay or even completely overlook women’s medical needs. The result is that innovation has mainly focused on what men choose to research. My colleagues John-Paul Ferguson, Sampsa Samila, and I show in a newly published study that patented biomedical inventions in the United States made by women benefit women’s health 35% more than biomedical inventions made by men.

Bias in Numbers

To determine which inventions are female, male, or neutral, we analyzed the title, abstract, and beginning of the summary text of 441,504 medical patents using the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Text Indexer. The indexer uses machine learning to categorize the subject of a text document, including whether it has female or male focus.

Our data show that inventions by research teams that are predominantly or entirely male are significantly more likely to target the medical needs of men. In 34 of the 35 years from 1976 to 2010, male majority teams produced hundreds more inventions that focused on the needs of men than those that focused on the needs of women. These male inventors were more likely to generate patents addressing issues like “erection” or “prostate” than “menopause” or “cervix”. Male inventors also tended to target diseases and conditions such as Parkinson’s and sleep apnea that disproportionately affect men.

Conversely, inventions patented by research teams comprised primarily or entirely of women were more likely to be geared towards the needs of women in all of our 35 years of data. These patents are more likely to cover conditions such as breast cancer and postpartum preeclampsia, as well as conditions that disproportionately affect women such as fibromyalgia and lupus. In 1976, however, only 6.3% of patents were invented by teams with as many women as men. By 2010 it was only 16.2%. As a result, while inventions by women were more likely to be women-focused, such patents were rare because so few inventors were women.

We found that from 1976 to 2010, biomedical inventions in inventor teams of all genders were more focused on the needs of men than women. Our calculations suggest that if inventors had been represented equally, 6,500 more inventions aimed at women would have been added during this period. In percentage terms, equal representation would have resulted in 12% more inventions aimed at women.

Pay attention to the needs of women

There are also more subtle benefits to having more women inventing. Women inventors are more likely to see how existing treatments for non-gender specific diseases such as heart attacks, diabetes and strokes can be improved and adapted to the needs of women. In fact, women are more likely to test whether their ideas and inventions affect men and women differently: For example, whether a drug has more undesirable side effects in women than in men.

In our study, we found that even in narrow disease areas such as atrial flutter, women are more likely to see opportunities to tailor their inventions to the specific health needs of women. Our results suggest that increasing representation should counteract these invisible distortions.

The growing number of women inventors is starting to fill the gap. In three of the five years from 2006 to 2010, the US granted more patents to women than men. In fact, since 2010 there has been a boom in women-owned startups developing new and disruptive products for women’s health, from new types of period underwear to smart breast pumps.

Pay attention to the gaps

Increasing the proportion of women inventors is important to improve women’s health care, but increasing the number of women scientists is not enough. It is also the case that women scientists are 40% less likely to commercialize their research ideas than women scientists. The causes of this gender gap are multiple, from differences in mentoring to biases in the feedback women get in the early stages when trying to commercialize ideas geared towards women.

Regardless of the underlying causes, the result is that although almost 33% of the published scientific discoveries in 2010 were created by predominantly female research teams, only 16.2% of the patents in the same year were invented by predominantly female inventor teams. As with the invention, we found that female scientists’ discoveries, as measured by published research, were 12% more likely to benefit women than men’s discoveries. At least in the short term, helping women scientists commercialize their current research should increase the number of women inventors and the number of inventions aimed at women.

Dr. Patricia Bath, inventor of a laser treatment to remove cataracts.

In general, our results show how demographic inequalities among those who are allowed to invent lead to demographic inequalities among those who benefit from inventions. Recent work shows how increasing the number of black doctors benefits black patients and, more generally, the benefits of bringing minority patients together with minority doctors. This suggests that not only does the world need more inventors like Griffith at MIT, but more inventors like Dr. Patricia Bath, the first black woman to receive a US medical patent. Bath’s invention of laser cataract removal was inspired by her observation that black Americans are twice as likely to go blind as white Americans.

Whether gender or race, prejudices about who is allowed to conduct research and market inventions, are more than just the question of who is allowed to participate. It’s also about who benefits from progress.

Article by Rem Koning, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

This article was republished by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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