Inequality among innovators is a substantial social problem in terms of both equity and economic growth. For instance, Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights group has documented that if women, racial minorities, and low-income Americans invented at the same rate as high-income white men, then the rate of U.S. patenting would quadruple. They also note the glacial progress toward closing these gaps, such as the 118 years it will take to reach gender parity at the current rate.
These inequalities affect not only the rate of innovation, but also what kind of innovations are created—for example, all-female inventor teams are more likely to focus on women’s health. Unfortunately, the evidence base for policy interventions to reduce these innovation gaps remains depressingly shallow. Most policies are tested without a rigorous evaluation strategy or control group, making it difficult to determine whether they had any effect.
A new paper from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO, is a remarkable addition to this literature. For the first time ever, the USPTO has tested a policy intervention as a randomized experiment, allowing a credible evaluation of its effectiveness. Changes in patent policy have rarely been tested with any element of randomization and have never been tested previously by the USPTO itself. Even if this experiment had yielded null results, the effort would still have been laudable as a model for how agencies can assess the impact of a new policy and publicly disclose the results. But the experiment also documents that the intervention—a new program to help patent applicants without legal representation—led to a sizeable decrease in the gender patenting gap.
The USPTO’s experiment began in 2014, when it created a new “Pro Se Pilot Examination Unit” to help pro se inventors (those without professional assistance) through the patent examination process. Obtaining a patent is not a user-friendly process, with most patent applications receiving a “rejection” or even a “final rejection” (which is actually more akin to a “revise and resubmit”) before eventually being allowed.
One study suggests that around half of the patent gender gap is due to women being more likely to abandon their patent applications after these discouraging replies rather than persisting in this back-and-forth process with the patent office. To address a concern that pro se inventors may be particularly disadvantaged in this process—for reasons unrelated to the merits of their inventions—patent examiners in the Pro Se Pilot received training on strategies to assist these inventors. For example, examiners would encourage applicants to call them with questions and would proactively help applicants draft better patent claims.
In the same way that promising new medicines are rigorously tested in randomized controlled trials that assign patients to either the new treatment or a control group, the USPTO decided to test this new examination unit by randomly assigning pro se applicants to either the Pro Se Pilot or to the regular examination process. By comparing outcomes across the two groups, they found that the Pro Se Pilot increased the likelihood of receiving a patent for all pro se applicants, and that it had a particularly striking effect for women. The likelihood of receiving a patent increased by 6.1 percentage points for men compared with 16.8 percentage points for women. The gender effect was even larger among first-time U.S. applicants: the likelihood of receiving a patent increased by 5.8 percentage points for men and a remarkable 23.5 percentage points for women. These results provide strong causal evidence of the new program’s value in closing the patent gender gap for pro se applicants.
Of course, this intervention is only one small step toward addressing the innovation gender gap more broadly. Future research should investigate whether similar changes in examiner training could help reduce the patent gender gap for broader groups of applicants. Less than 1% of U.S. patent applicants are pro se, but the additional guidance provided through the Pro Se Pilot might also help a larger group of inventors, such as those at small and micro entities who are currently disadvantaged by lower-quality legal representation.
In addition, the USPTO should study whether the reduced gender gap persists beyond patenting. Receiving a patent is worth little in isolation; financially benefiting from patents depends on other institutions with their own gender biases, such as corporate rent-sharing and venture capital. The Pro Se Pilot increased the likelihood that a pro se applicant would receive a patent, but it is worth examining longer-term outcomes such as assignments of these patents, new patent applications from these inventors, and non-patent outcomes gathered by survey or by linking to other datasets.
But the need for further research should not detract from the monumental nature of this study, which has simultaneously tackled two problems of bipartisan interest: inequality among innovators, and the need for better evidence to improve government effectiveness. In 2018, President Trump signed the SUCCESS Act of 2018, which tasked the USPTO with studying and recommending solutions to the problem of inequality among innovators. And the USPTO’s current Learning Agenda—developed pursuant to the Evidence Act of 2018—commits the agency to develop evidence on how to improve the effectiveness of patent examination in general, and with assessing participation in the patent system by underserved populations. The success of the first randomized controlled trial run by the USPTO on both of these fronts will hopefully inspire the use of rigorous experiments to test other policy interventions, both within and outside the patent context.
