A Registration of Her Own: Protecting Women’s Intellectual Property

As an intellectual property (IP) lawyer for the last 30 years, I’ve worked with many inventors, authors, creators and other IP owners. Through my work, I have realized that women are often less likely to protect their intellectual property, including not only their inventions, but also their creative works and even trademarks. It has been frustrating and disheartening, frankly, to see women not value their own contributions and work (or, even if they recognize the value, not have the resources to properly protect them—more on that later). To help counter women’s underrepresentation in IP protection, I have spent many hours over the years trying to educate others—especially women—on the value and importance of IP to their business and the need to protect it. Many of these women have faced and overcome countless hurdles to achieve their success, yet they do not take the steps they need to protect what they have created or built. Why? And what can we do about it? I certainly do not have all the answers to this problem but identifying that there is an issue is certainly the first step. To be sure, also, like so many areas in which there is gender disparity, the problems—and solutions—do not all rest with women but making sure that women have all the knowledge and tools necessary to advocate for themselves is absolutely essential.

Research in recent years first into women’s patenting and now into women’s copyright registrations supports my anecdotal experience. In the last few years, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Congress and others have been focused on the lack of women inventors named on U.S. patents. Perhaps the most interesting part of the research results has been evidence that this is not merely a pipeline problem. Even considering the lower representation of women in most science and technical fields, women are simply less likely to patent than men. For example, the 2020 update to the 2019 study by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed that the share of women named as inventors in the United States is only 12.8% although the share of women among new inventors on issued patents is slightly higher at 17.3%. Although people often assume that these lower numbers are due to pipeline problems, studies have shown that the gender gap in patenting is not fully explained by the STEM gap. For example, an oft-cited 2012 study about the patenting gender gap that focused on commercialized patents reveals that “a staggering 78% of the commercial patenting gap is due to lower patenting rates among women who hold S&E degrees.” In these research reports and, as I have previously discussed, also during the 2019 Congressional hearings on this issue, various potential causes have been identified, including everything from the marginalization of women or co-opting of their inventions to fewer role models, a lack of knowledge about the patent system and process, fewer financial resources (including receiving less private equity investment), and a lack of recognition of the value of patenting. In short, it appears the problem is not that women are inventing less than their male counterparts, but patenting less.