Gender-specific patterns in patenting and publishing

Measuring the output of men and women in science and technology has previously been mostly restricted to case studies or small-scale surveys. Based on an analysis of patent and publication databases, this paper applies a methodology to systematically assign the gender to the names of inventors and authors. The method is applied to 14 countries. The results of this investigation reveal substantial differences across countries in terms of women's relative contribution1 to science and technology, with the central European countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland all ranking comparatively low in this respect. We also examine trends over time, showing that the data on women's share of publications – unlike the results for patents – hardly increase over time for the already better-performing nations.