הפער בין המינים באקדמיה בישראל: בחינה אמפירית של רישום פטנטים במגזר האקדמי

The gender gap in academia has long been the focus of public discourse regarding the role academic institution play in promoting social values. Integrating women into senior academic positions, especially in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, is essential to promoting women’s advancement in society in general and has significant implications for female entrepreneurial and innovative potential.In this study, we seek to assess the gender gap in the Israeli academy by examining the nature and extent of women’s participation in transferring knowledge from the academy to industry. One of the predominant models for such knowledge transfers is based on the registration of patents for inventions developed by academic institutions in the course of their activities. Academic patenting is thus a significant component of the professional activities of faculty members worldwide. However, to date, female academic patenting has received little attention.The Israeli academy provides an excellent opportunity to study female academic patenting for two reasons. First, a world leader in scientific research, Israel has been transferring technology since the early 1960s. Second, because it is a small country, it is possible to conduct a comprehensive study, examining all patent applications filed by academic institutions since Israel was established in 1948. In this study, we compared the extent to which women and men are involved in patent filings by Israeli academic institutions. After a comparative quantitative analysis of the inventors’ names on the patent applications, we determined the inventors’ gender while controlling for various other patent-application characteristics, such as patent registration success rates, fields of research, forward citations, and more.Our study yielded several key findings. We found that women file far fewer patent applications than men. Our database included 6,825 patent families, of which 320applications were filed by women inventors only, 3,607 applications were filed by men only, and 2,898 applications were filed by mixed inventor groups. These data alone demonstrate a gender disparity in patenting activity in the Israeli academy, as a thorough examination of the gender composition of mixed-group patent applications shows that women are outnumbered by men. The study also found that women are significantly less involved in academic patenting than are men, considering women’s representation in STEM faculties in Israel. We found that while the share of patent applications filed by men exceeded their share of academic positions, the share of patent applications filed by women was much lower than their share of academic positions. For example, in 2017 and 2018,+ women’s rate of patenting as about 35%lower than that of men. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals that applications naming male, female, and mixed-group inventors have comparable acceptance rates, and that there is no meaningful gender-based distinction when it comes to the invention’s scientific field or forward citations.The importance of this study is that it reveals that even when it appears that women are successfully engaged in academic activity – they have been appointed to the senior faculty in STEM fields, for example – there is a significant difference in the types of activities that women and men pursue. Moreover, our results suggest that women have not achieved their full potential for invention and knowledge transfer in the STEM fields, resulting in potential economic and social losses to society.Our findings can serve as a springboard for further in-depth research on various aspects of women’s integration into academia to identify failures to achieve gender equality that may be masked by women’s increasing representation on various faculties. As the results of our study make clear, equality in academia is not merely a question of how many women are academic faculty members, but also of whether female faculty can and do participate in their institution’s patenting and other important research activities at rates similar to those of their male colleagues.