Where Women's Patents Disappear

Women make up 29% of the U.S. STEM workforce. They are 12.8% of U.S. patent inventors. The 16-point gap does not appear all at once.

It opens at filing, widens at first office action, widens again at response, again at appeal, again at grant, and again at post-grant citation. Each stage individually looks small. The product is not small.

This page walks the prosecution funnel one stage at a time. At each stage we show the published data on the disparity, where it comes from, and what is known about why it persists. The cumulative picture is the patent gender gap as it actually exists, not as a single statistic.

This article presents published research data for educational purposes. It is not legal, policy, or investment advice. Patent gender statistics depend on name-based inference and methodology choices: see How we measure.

The funnel at a glance

Each row below is a stage at which the gender gap measurably widens. We expand each in its own section after the table.

1. Filing: the gap before the system sees the invention

The first leak in the funnel is not a USPTO decision at all. It is a decision made inside companies, universities, and labs about whose work gets written into a disclosure form and forwarded to counsel.

The USPTO's Progress and Potential 2020 update found that women were 12.8% of U.S. inventor-patentees as of 2019, while women's share of the STEM workforce is closer to 29%. The gap at filing is therefore at least 16 percentage points on its own, before any examination has occurred.

Structural causes are well documented. University tech transfer offices report consistently lower invention disclosure rates from women researchers, even when controlled for research output and field. Pre-populated disclosure forms (where the form lists all lab members rather than asking the PI to nominate inventors) have measurably closed this gap: Washington University's WIT program saw a 129% increase in women's patent filings after introducing structural interventions of this kind.

2. First office action: the rejection-rate gap

Once an application is filed, the first signal from the USPTO is the first office action. A 2024 study published in Scientific Reports analyzed millions of U.S. patent applications and found that applications with female inventors receive more rejections per application than otherwise comparable applications with male inventors.

The differential persists after controlling for technology area, entity size, attorney type, and claim count. The effect is most pronounced in applications filed by large entities and least pronounced in applications filed by universities. Both of those facts point to a structural rather than a technical cause: the same inventor's same disclosure has measurably different prosecution outcomes depending on who files it.

Pairolero et al. (American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2025) ran the first randomized controlled trial at the USPTO. Senior examiners trained to assist pro se applicants increased the grant rate for women's applications by 12% and the first-time applicant rate by 17%. The intervention did not change the inventions. It changed how the prosecution conversation unfolded.

3. Response and abandonment: where most of the gap actually lives

This is the largest single leak in the funnel.

Research published by MIT Press in 2024 found that women inventors are 3.7 to 6.9 percentage points less likely than men to continue prosecuting a patent application after receiving a rejection. The effect is concentrated in cases where the first office action is a non-final rejection: a step that for many male-named applications becomes an iterative response cycle ending in grant, but for many female-named applications ends in abandonment.

The same study estimated that more than half of the overall granted-patent gender gap is attributable to this differential abandonment, not to quality differences in the underlying inventions and not to discrimination at the filing stage. The patents are being filed. They are reaching examination. They are simply not being defended through to grant at the same rate.

The UK IPO's 2026 Female Participation in Inventorship report (Brady Bowes, March 5, 2026) corroborates the same pattern in a different jurisdiction with cleaner team-level granularity.

4. Appeal: the additional 2.5% gap

For the subset of applications that reach a final rejection, the next decision point is whether to appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Jensen and colleagues at Yale found that women are approximately 2.5% less likely than men to file a PTAB appeal at this stage, controlling for technology and entity type.

The effect is small in absolute terms but it compounds. A final rejection followed by no appeal is a permanent loss. Several appeal-rate studies have proposed that the gap reflects both cost sensitivity (appeals are expensive) and confidence factors that interact with broader patterns in how inventors of different backgrounds engage with legal systems.

5. Grant and claim scope: even the patents that issue look different

For applications that survive to grant, the gap shifts from quantity to quality. The 2024 Scientific Reports analysis found that granted patents with female inventors have narrower independent claims on average than otherwise comparable patents with male inventors. Independent claim scope is the single most important determinant of a patent's enforcement value: narrower claims are easier to design around and harder to license.

The narrower-claim effect operates through prosecution: when examination is harder (Stage 2) and abandonment after rejection is higher (Stage 3), the remaining path to grant often runs through claim amendments that narrow scope. The patents that issue have, on average, been negotiated into a smaller commercial footprint to get there.

Combined, the lower grant rate and narrower granted claims mean that the same invention disclosure, prosecuted by a female-led team versus a male-led team, ends with a measurably less valuable patent asset. The disclosure-to-asset conversion is gendered.

6. Post-grant: citation, licensing, and the breakthrough penalty

Even after grant, the funnel is not done.

Jensen et al. found that patents whose inventors carry common female first names are cited approximately 30% less than otherwise comparable patents. The methodology is robust to several controls and points at a citation-side disparity that is independent of the underlying patent's technical content.

A 2026 study in PNAS documents the "breakthrough penalty" we name elsewhere in this series: applications from women-majority inventor teams that combine ideas in unconventional ways grant at substantially lower rates than otherwise comparable applications from male-majority teams. The grant-rate gap on unconventional applications reaches 14.9 percentage points. The most novel inventions from under-represented inventor teams are precisely the ones the patent system rewards least.

This stage matters commercially because forward citations and licensing revenue are how patents generate value over their 20-year term. A grant is not the end of the funnel. It is the beginning of the asset's commercial life. If the post-grant trajectory is shorter and quieter for women-involved patents, the cumulative gender gap in patent-generated wealth is larger than the gap in patent counts.

The cumulative arithmetic

Each individual stage in the funnel looks tractable. A 5-point gap here, a 3-point gap there, a 30% citation differential at the end. Considered separately, each one feels like a research finding that could be addressed with a focused intervention.

Considered together, the arithmetic is sobering. A 16-point gap at filing, followed by a higher rejection rate, followed by a 5-point persistence gap, followed by a 2.5-point appeal gap, followed by narrower granted claims, followed by 30% fewer citations, does not produce a 16-point gap at the end. It produces something considerably worse.

This is why interventions at a single stage rarely move the headline number. Closing one leak in the funnel is necessary but not sufficient. The interventions that have moved the needle (WashU WIT, USPTO RCT, structural disclosure-form changes) tend to operate on the earliest stages and on the response-and-abandonment stage, because those are the two highest-leverage points in the cumulative arithmetic.

What this means for organizations

For tech transfer offices, corporate IP teams, and patent counsel: the most consequential decisions about whose inventions become patents are made before the USPTO ever sees the application. Pre-populated disclosure forms, proactive outreach to under-represented researchers, and funded prosecution support after a first rejection are the three interventions with measured results.

For inventors: the difference between an abandoned application and a granted patent is most often persistence through the response cycle. Knowing the data on the response-and-abandonment gap is itself a small intervention.

For everyone else: the patent system was designed to reward inventors. Its current operation systematically rewards some inventors less than others for the same work. That is a structural problem, not an individual one. The data above is published. The interventions that close the gap are documented. The question is not what to do. It is whether to do it.

Sources

More from the patent gender gap series