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We've blogged before about gender inequality and the persistent male/female wage gap.  A new working paper by Jennifer Hunt, Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, and David J. Munroe highlights another arena where women are lagging: commercialized patents. Only 7.5 percent of regular patent and 5.5 percent of commercial patent holders are female.  The authors explored various explanations for the gap: Using the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, we find only 7% of the gap is accounted for by women's lower probability of holding any science or engineering degree, because women with such a degree are scarcely more likely to patent than women without.
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We've written before about Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz's research on the persistent gender wage gap in the U.S.  Now Goldin and Katz are back with a new working paper (abstract; PDF) on "the most egalitarian of all U.S. profession... Read Post

  The Department of Labor has released its latest data on women's earning, and the Economix blog highlights how younger women experience a smaller wage gap relative to young male workers. In 2009, women ages 16 to 19 who worked full... Read Post

Alex Tabarrok with a good catch: In Why Don’t Women Patent?, a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. [Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, and David Munroe] present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents ... Read Post