About Inventors

Why are most inventors men?

That’s an interesting question. Here’s what PBS thinks the answer is:

For 226 years men led the US Patent and Trademark Office, the agency that fosters American innovation and entrepreneurship. Enter Michelle Lee, the agency’s first female leader.

Michelle Lee is not only the first woman to head the Patent Office but she’s also an American of East Asian descent. In case you haven’t noticed Asians are overrepresented in the tech field. PBS didn’t notice that point, which is germane to what follows.

A Silicon Valley native who built a radio with her father in the family living room, Lee grew up with female classmates who thrived in math and science.

But there were fewer females in her computer science and electrical engineering classes at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and even fewer as she went on to conduct lab research for Hewlett-Packard. Today, despite occupying half the nation’s jobs, women hold fewer than a quarter of jobs in science, technology, engineering and math, she said.

Nominated by President Barack Obama in 2014 to lead the nation’s patent and trademark agency, part of Lee’s mission was to change that, to involve more women and plug leaks in the nation’s innovation pipeline. Her strategy: Start early, and “spark in our children the desire to invent and create.”

“We can’t afford to leave inventors behind,” Lee told the NewsHour. “You never know who’s going to come up with that next big idea.”

Today, women hold less than one out of five STEM-related patents, and it’s been slow growth just to make it that far. Still, that’s a huge rise since 1977 when women were awarded only 3% of all patents. By 1996, that figure had only gone up 10 percentage points…

Ah… Because disparate impact.

What feeds this disparity?

[Jessica Milli, who did a study on this subject,] floated some possibilities. Men still outnumber women in STEM research, which means women have smaller, more limited networks they can turn to for advice, she said. Those networks can also make the difference in access to venture capital to usher an idea into reality…

So clearly we need more government-mandated diversity.

In 2011, in a sweeping set of patent reforms, Congress passed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. The new law was designed in part to support more women and people of color in innovation and create a system that monitors diversity if these goals are met.

What about Muslim inventors? LGBTwhatevers? Clearly this law needs updating or an extra-legislative regulatory re-write. Oh, and perhaps the Patent Office should somehow follow the lead of higher education and discriminate against Asian applicants.

Apparently not everybody has gotten with the program…

But during public comment, many people rejected mandatory surveys on gender, race and ethnicity and instead “strongly urged the USPTO to conduct surveys only on a voluntary basis out of privacy concerns,” according to a September 2015 report from the patent office. Concern remained that the resulting data would be skewed and inaccurate if applicants voluntarily submitted this information.

Historically, the patent office has not asked for an applicant’s gender or race, Lee said, but based on research so far, she concedes that diversity data for applicants “are not as good as they could be.”

The absence of meaningful diversity data perplexed Navrina Singh, who oversees a team that identifies emerging technologies and markets for telecommunications company, Qualcomm, in San Diego. “You can’t solve for something if you don’t know what the causes are,” she said…

If people want to see more female inventors and entrepreneurs, [Julie] Samuels [of the pressure group Tech NYC] said it’s crucial to share those stories and empower more women to build up their own ideas, inventions and companies.

“We have some work to do. It’s not just women. It’s diversity in all shapes and forms,” Samuels said. “We have to undo decades of a broken system.”

OK, let’s dissect this.

First, I think we should acknowledge the role of “the patriarchy” in discouraging female participation in all sorts of traditionally male fields of endeavor. But this is more an historical than a current factor. Nowadays the tendency is to overcompensate.

The second question I think we should ask what exactly is broken here. Are the quantity of new patents declining? Nope. They’ve roughly doubled in number over the past 15 years. So what are we fixing?

Third, could there be innate differences between men and women that manifest themselves in the area of inventions? Leftists never want to go there but I think we need to.

Gender differences extend beyond physical dimorphism. Males have a greater attraction to things mechanical, writ large. There is, of course, individual variation (in my family Miz Fixit is my good wife – it sure isn’t me). Still, we’re talking about group averages here. Males exhibit greater variance in intelligence – higher highs, lower lows – than do females. In terms of behavior and achievement men are disproportionately represented in best and worst of the human race. There are far more males than females among our top thinkers and the most reprehensible thugs. Maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with the five-fold gender difference in STEM-related patents.

Why these psychological differences? Testosterone, I suspect. Male willingness to take risks, for sure. It’s a hard-wired survival mechanism, probably – tied to the genders’ reproductive roles.

The left is all about denying reality in favor of ideology, so their answer to this non-problem is more government affirmative action – quotas and other thumb-on-the-scales measures. This might generate more patents put forward by women. But it will also contribute to the already-extant problem of male dropouts across academia and, therefore, in technical fields requiring academic preparation. Yep, let’s discourage those most naturally inclined toward innovation from, you know, innovating. Let’s marginalized boys further so that more of them have nothing better to do with all that testosterone than acquire a stolen pistol and go on a crime spree.

What I see here is further politicization of the sciences, something that’s already becoming a big problem. T’s not just in climatology anymore.

How about we try simple equal opportunity, then let the patents fall as they may?

-Tacitus

Copyright 2016 Tacitus
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