Female Patent Lawyers
As a female patent lawyer, I always enjoy working with women inventors. I have noticed throughout my career as an engineer and as a patent lawyer that I deal with far more male inventors than female inventors. After looking into it, I realized that my suspicions were right: women are underrepresented as both inventors and patent lawyers to advocate for their clients.
According to a Law Review article from the John Marshall School of Law, women on average constitute less than 20% of the patent practitioners registered with the USPTO. And while these numbers vary by industry, they are below 20% for most fields.
Women Inventors
As a society, we somehow managed to shed light on gender wage gap, but I’m afraid the patent gender gap is very far behind. Women hold a very small percentage of patents compared to men, and some studies show that less than 20% of issued patents have a named female inventor.
Having been a minority in my undergraduate class of Aerospace Engineering, and in the engineering corporate world, I can attest to those slim numbers. What troubled me the most was a recent study showing bias towards women in innovative fields. A Yale study found that out of 2.7 million US patent applicants, women have less favorable outcomes than men when applying for patents. It is well known that women are underrepresented in STEM and innovative industries. But what was truly shocking in that article is that “women inventors are less likely to have their patent applications approved than men, but that disparity dips if an examiner can’t guess an inventor’s gender from her name.” Mere coincidence?
How these issues are reflected in the marketplace
Despite the STEM issue, I have seen situations where female inventors come up with great products for women and be misunderstood by fellow male patent attorneys. And the truth is, some of these products solve female needs that sometimes only other women can understand. Sometimes, men don’t really understand the need for or utility of those everyday female items. Sara Blakely, the inventor and founder of Spanx, mentioned having the same problem when she came up with her idea. She looked hard for a female patent lawyer to help protect what is now seen as a revolutionary female product that most women (in the U.S at least) either own or have at least heard of.
Some ideas are just easier to explain to a female patent lawyer than they would be to explain to a man. When Sara Blakely wanted to protect her idea and looked into patenting it, she looked for a female patent lawyer because she thought it would be easier to explain her idea, but couldn’t find one. She called the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, and asked for a recommendation for a female patent attorney, and the Chamber of Commerce actually said there was not a single female patent attorney at the time in the whole state of Georgia! Granted times have changed, but while some progress was made in this field, we still have a very long way to go.