{"id":39,"date":"2020-04-01T11:47:52","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T11:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.isb.edu\/sritnetechtalks\/?p=39"},"modified":"2025-12-31T09:46:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T09:46:27","slug":"women-in-technology-and-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.isb.edu\/sritnetechtalks\/2020\/04\/01\/women-in-technology-and-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Women In Technology And Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The early pioneers of technology and innovation were woman who, for the most part of\u00a0 history, were unheralded. Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Anita Borg, among many others, have worked on groundbreaking inventions and computations in the field of nuclear physics, human-computer interaction, astronomical crunching, programming language compilations, etc. Only now these contributions are being recognised and rightly attributed. It is fair to say that woman participation, by and large, is being encouraged and supported: with organisations taking conscious efforts for inclusion, with measures undertaken to address issues of pay parity, woman\u2019s return to work, education for girls, etc. But this improvement is rather trivial. The tech community largely reeks of gender- (and minority) based inequalities in terms of opportunities and pay. The proportion of female executives considerably dwindles along the hierarchical ladder, and even more so in the STEM community. Gender inequality in technology and innovation is a stigma that calls for immediate action.<\/p>\n

Ongoing research at the Srini Raju Centre for IT and Networked Economy<\/a> examines the biases against woman in technological innovation. The research was primarily motivated by the need to discern the under-representation of minorities, specifically, woman in patenting. The results highlight the presence of significant gender-based bias[1]<\/sup> in obtaining patents.[2] <\/sup><\/a>We create a measure of novelty in patent application and discuss the consequences of producing different technology for female over male inventors. Uniqueness or novelty of a patent application is calculated as its inverse similarity to those filed in the previous year in the same technological class. We observe that higher dissimilarity is rewarded with a higher rate of acceptance, higher maintainability, more citations, etc. Contrariwise, dissimilar patents with a high proportion of female inventors do not see equivalent acceptance.<\/p>\n

Our findings show that woman inventors face higher penalties \u2013 lower rates of patent acceptances, more days to grants, higher efforts for maintenance \u2013 for novelty. These costs hold true for patent applications in varied scenarios, such as:<\/p>\n