Aspiring Women Inventors Still Stalled by University Patriarchy

Pamela Silver is one of the most heralded American bioengineers of her generation, showered with prestigious awards, titles, and grants during an industry-shaking career spanning more than 40 years. Among those accomplishments are 20 patents in her name, including a method for fixing carbon using bacteria, and technology to make sustainable biomolecules.

But when Silver was a Ph.D. student at UCLA in the early 1980s, she had no idea how to file a patent. Despite her seemingly endless aptitude for math and science, no one showed Silver how to protect her research through the deeply bureaucratic system of patent submissions.

She worked in a lab at the forefront of molecular biology as a student, but it wasn’t until after Silver graduated in 1982 that she discovered her male adviser had added her name to a patent application without her knowledge. That was how Silver—now a founding member of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology—won her first patent.

Pamela Silver

Photo courtesy of Harvard Medical School

Although Silver’s experience dates back decades, women remain distinctly disadvantaged along the path to inventorship in academic settings.

“I have been the victim of sex discrimination for a long, long time,” said Silver, who has been a member American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2017, received the prestigious National Institutes of Health MERIT award, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.

Women are often ignored by professors holding the keys needed to unlock the patent application process, and overlooked in favor of their male counterparts, said Fiona E. Murray, associate dean of innovation and inclusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Management.

Female Ph.D. students in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—are 17% less likely to become new inventors compared with their male counterparts, even when matched with a top faculty member, according to a paper published in October by Murray and Mercedes Delgado, a professor at Copenhagen Business School. Women STEM Ph.D. students are also 21% less likely than men to receive training from faculty who are also prolific inventors equipped to make or break their chances of earning a patent while in school, according to the paper.

“What we can show is relative to the supply into Ph.D. programs, there’s still just this huge difference in the percentage of women on patents coming out of the labs than there are in the university,” said Murray. She describes women’s path to inventorship as a “leaky pipeline.”

Silver recalls being denied an opportunity to attend and present her research at a prestigious conference when she was a student. Instead, a male classmate was called upon, “because it’s more important to his career,” said Silver who remembers vividly the excuse her adviser offered. “That can be interpreted in many ways, but it kind of resonated for me.”

Patenting World Problems

Murray and Delgado’s findings highlight the importance of universities’ early cultivation of women’s passion for inventorship. The sooner students learn commercial science skills—the art of profiting off their research—the more likely they are to impact the economy, including landing jobs and creating more inventions, Murray said.

Women are more likely to stay within STEM fields if they have a deep connection to the mission of their research, especially if it can solve a problem in the world, according to Murray.

“If patenting and invention can be part of that, then I actually think it will serve multiple purposes, Murray said. “Not just giving people skill sets, but actually really sort of shaping career choices and making sure that people are incredibly productive when they get out into the economy.”

Vera L. Suarez, a patent attorney and partner at Haynes and Boone, said she has no doubt from her experience that a gender disparity persists among inventors, patent agents, and attorneys. Bridging that gap is not just a matter of finding a new generation of female inventors, but convincing female inventors that not every patent has to be a groundbreaking invention.

Suarez, who focuses her work on design patents, said sometimes clients don’t realize that patents can be a small improvement and not an industry disruptor.

“I think women are innovating, maybe they are not aware that their contribution is patent-eligible,” Suarez said, who formerly worked as a field engineer before pursuing law.

Gender disparities aren’t limited to inventors; they extend to the attorneys who represent inventors and their applications.

The requirements to practice before the US Patent and Trademark Office as a patent attorney include a background in hard sciences—like physics, biology, chemistry, and geology—in addition to a law degree. These technical standards centered on utility patents have challenged women to make inroads in the patent bar, but the path is gradually being paced by more women going into STEM.

The USPTO announced in November that it’s creating a new design patent bar, with expanded admission criteria for attorneys. Suarez said this move could open the doors to more women seeking to practice intellectual property without having a hard-science background.

Jordana R. Goodman, an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, said there are many law schools with more women graduates than men nowadays, but still the gender disparities occur among attorneys who practice intellectual property.

Women accounted for only 20% of registered patent attorneys in 2019, according to a 2020 analysis by the American Bar Association. The barriers for women wanting to practice patent litigation aren’t limited to technical requirements, but instead are the result of culture and misunderstanding, said Goodman, who noted that unlike the PTO, courts don’t require a STEM degree to practice patent law.

Lawyers may depart from their goals after hearing the word “no” too many times. This happens to women more often than men when pursuing higher education and legal work involving patents, according to Goodman.

“A lot of people think that you need a STEM degree in order to practice patent litigation, and that’s just not true,” Goodman said. “But even among law professors, I find people discouraging people” from a career in patent litigation “simply because of their undergraduate degree, and that’s really disheartening.”

Incremental Progress

Women inventors made up just 13% of US patent holders in 2019, according to an October 2022 report by the USPTO.

Yang Yang, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, is one of them. She met her adviser as a student while pursuing a master’s degree in architecture. Her adviser was researching urban mobility systems, which led Yang to pursue her doctorate.

“My adviser is relatively young. I was his second Ph.D. [student],” Yang, 31, said. “At the time that I joined the lab, I was the only woman.”

There are now two women among the four doctoral candidates at Cornell’s environmental systems lab. Yang will receive new funding as part of the Ignite Fellow for New Ventures program after she graduates. She filed her first provisional patent application in 2022 as a requirement for the upcoming postdoctoral fellowship.

Central to her success is Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing, the university’s technology-transfer office, which focuses on commercialization and partnerships geared toward helping inventors profit from their creations.

Cornell determined only 23% of its inventors who submitted invention disclosure forms between 2009 and 2017 were women, according to the university’s website.

Alice Li, executive director of the Center for Technology Licensing at Cornell, said the university launched the Women’s Innovators Initiative in 2020 to introduce women faculty, staff, and students to technology innovation and commercialization. The initiative has a mentorship program, workshops, and awards that highlight women inventors. The center is now working to expand its outreach and resources to other historically disadvantaged groups, she said

“It takes an overall village. Many people want to help but not everyone realizes exactly what the gap is and how to help,” Li said, who envisions support programs that start earlier in Ph.D. training to build foundations toward inventorship. “You want to help in a way that’s productive and inclusive and make real changes in a way that really benefits.”

Rice University is taking a similar approach to boosting women inventors.

Seventeen women on the Rice campus are researching and training in a lab directed by Omid Veiseh, an associate bioengineering professor at Rice who has more than 40 pending or awarded patents.

Samantha Fleury, a Ph.D. candidate working in Veiseh’s lab. She said she’s benefited from Rice’s push for innovation among students, the mentorship of her adviser, and seeing women representation in STEM. Her two older sisters are also both inventors, pushing Fleury to apply for her own patent.

“I would assume there’s a lot more patents awarded to men at this point in history than there are women,” Fleury, 27, said. “I like to do my part to even out those numbers.”

Patents for Progress

MIT, Rice, the University of Texas system, and Cornell—four academic institutions ranked in the top 100 US universities for utility patent grants in 2022—have innovation programs to increase inventorship and commercialization within their academic community.

When Warda Ashraf, 38, was a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering, she never considered applying for a patent. No one made Ashraf aware of the process of protecting her research.

An immigrant already unfamiliar with the US patent system, Ashraf didn’t know any women patent owners—a situation shared with many of her fellow female inventors. Ashraf received her Ph.D. in 2017.

She didn’t submit her first complete patent application until March 2022, and it was filed only after she became an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Now as a faculty adviser, Ashraf works to ensure her Ph.D. students don’t face the same impediments. She said that while the lack of representation among women inventors may discourage some, she’s taken it upon herself to encourage others.

“It is also important to not just apply for the patents but push it for either commercialization, like a startup, or work with other people,” Ashraf said.

For her part, Silver has relationships with companies focused on commercializing her research. She said investors have always approached her about commercializing her work, and not the other way around. Silver was once told an invention was “too limited” for a patent, but years later a group of investors approached her to commercialize the same research.

“But the lesson I learned from that is don’t necessarily be upset if they take a pass on your intellectual property,” Silver said.

Silver went from growing up in the late 1950s during a time researchers were amazed a girl had the ability to manipulate numbers and be so mathematically precocious, to having her own lab at Harvard Medical School. Silver tells women trainees to be cautious about who they take as mentors, to keep notes of events and their feelings during their career, and to take chances.

“I’m a risk taker,” she said. “I’m a troublemaker.”