Are men's ideas valued more than women's?

Inventors may also respond differently to research authored by women. Gender acts as a powerful cultural frame, shaping beliefs about individual competence. Research shows that products created by women are evaluated less favourably than identical products by men. This devaluation is also observed in the realm of entrepreneurship.

If gendered status beliefs are indeed present in science-based innovation, this could result in inventors paying less attention to and undervaluing women’s scientific ideas – with significant implications for technology development.

Also read: AI may reproduce gender, ethnicity biases in mental health tools 

Gender inequality and innovation

We chose to examine patent-to-paper citations as a measure of the flow of knowledge from academia to inventors. When inventors submit an application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, they include citations to relevant scientific publications. These can be seen as bibliometric fossils of sorts, recording inventors’ reliance on scientific ideas over time.

If, as we hypothesised, inventors rely more on male-authored research, we should observe that scientific publications receive fewer citations in US patents if their main author is a woman.

First, we analysed over 10 million scientific articles published between 1980 and 2020, correlating the main author’s gender with the publication’s citations in patents. We found that articles with a woman as the main author received fewer patent citations, on average, than those whose main author is a man.

We next zoomed in on paper twins: instances where different teams of scientists – led by either a woman or a man – publish essentially the same idea around the same time. Our sample included 185 papers, with an average gap between publication dates of 1.65 months. Even though all authors made the same discoveries, we still observed gender differences, as in our first analysis.

Our key finding in both sets of analyses supports the argument that inventors rely significantly less on scientific discoveries from teams led by women scientists, even when the ideas are virtually the same.

Finally, in an online experiment, we randomly assigned 390 participants to read a paper abstract attributed to either a male or female author. We found that participants spent more time reading the abstract and felt the discovery was more important when they believed its main author was a man as opposed to a woman.

The effect of the gender gap

If innovation depends on standing on the shoulders of giants, one should naturally aim to stand on the tallest shoulders. However, our findings reveal that inventors working on science-based technology lean less on scientific ideas from women than men. This gender disparity can significantly influence the impact of women’s ideas – specifically, their use in the development of new technologies.

It’s worth noting that it’s possible our results are related to the vast overrepresentation of men in science and technology; the gender gap could disappear, or even reverse, in fields dominated by women, such as education and nursing. We found no clear evidence that the gender gap in patent-to-paper citations is driven by supply-side mechanisms such as access to resources, networks and scientific style. Rather, our results align more with demand-side explanations, in particular the notion that inventors pay more attention to, and place higher value on, scientific publications authored by men.

These sobering findings not only illuminate our understanding of friction in science-based technology development but also inform broader theories of how gender inequality shapes innovation. Gendered status beliefs can impact the knowledge transfer from science to technology, creating an uneven playing field for women’s scientific ideas. 

Practical and policy implications

Since innovations shape the future, overlooking women’s contributions risks creating a world predominantly envisioned by men – which, most would argue, is an unsettling prospect. Most obviously, gender disparities in inventors’ reliance on scientific ideas would shape both the rate and direction of innovation. In fact, this mechanism might be one reason for the ‘‘thousands of missing female-focused inventions since 1976’’.

We also offer insights for those seeking to incentivise innovation. Many people have rightly raised concerns that the underrepresentation of women in science and technology deprives society of valuable skills and knowledge. However, our findings suggest that fair representation alone may not be enough to maximise innovation if women’s ideas aren’t given a fair chance. For firms and institutions aiming to leverage academic science, recognising that valuable work from women (or other lower-status actors) may be overlooked can prompt a broader search to identify impactful ideas that might otherwise be missed. 

Although we focused exclusively on gender differences related to science and technology development, and gender inequality in innovation is a well-documented phenomenon, it’s possible that unequal reliance on men’s and women’s ideas exists in other settings. For example, similar dynamics might play out in curators’ selections of pieces for art exhibitions, or in university faculty’s reading lists for courses.

A growing number of firms rely on scientific ideas to build new technologies, and one would hope that inventors would focus on the best ideas. Yet, our findings highlight that the interface between science and technology isn’t shaped solely by the quality of ideas. At this critical frontier for innovators, gender inequality unfortunately matters, too.