Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Women hold fewer than one in 10 patents. Why? And what are we missing out on?
1,530 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Rizdal.
Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is The Hidden Side of Everything. Dubner, welcome back.
Thank you, Kai. I want to talk to you about this economic buzzword these days, innovation. We've got to innovate our way back to greatness. Do you know who's got the most room for improvement in the innovation field?
You and me, baby.
Well, that's the sad truth, isn't it? But if you look at the data on patents, okay, patent filing, it turns out that women are responsible for only about 7.5% of all patents filed.
70... I mean, that's amazing. That's 93 something percent for men? That's ridiculous.
Well, 92 something, but I know math is not your strong suit.
I'm a math guy. Has to be science and engineering, right? And the lack of women therein?
Yeah, that's a very sensible first thought, not a bad one, Kai. You're doing better. But it's a surprising fact. The fact is that even women with science and engineering degrees aren't much more likely to file a patent than women with other degrees. Now, Jenny Hunt, who's an economist at Rutgers, she says that one big factor is that you just don't find a lot of women in the kind of sweet spot jobs within an industry that lead to a lot of patent filing.
Men are more likely to be in jobs involving design work or development work, so the D in the R and D. And even within given fields of study, women are less likely to be in those jobs, and that also reduces their patenting.
Now, you know, this idea, Kai, actually explains a lot of the male-female wage gap across the board in different industries, whether it's business, or medicine, or education. Women end up gravitating toward the lower-paying jobs within those fields. So, you know, say, a general practice physician versus a surgeon.
Yeah, well, all right. So is that women being steered away from those jobs? Is that subtle discrimination? Or is it women making the career and family choice that men seldom make? I mean, there's a lot going on, right?
It is all of the above, certainly. Probably most of the latter. A lot of it is by choice, but not all of it. Some of it is discrimination. But the bigger point that Jenny Hunt is making about the patent data is that by having such a low rate of female patenting, even within the science and engineering fields, the US is missing an opportunity. So she argues that closing the male-female patenting gap in science and engineering would have a dramatic effect on the economy, that it might lift GDP per capita by as much as 2.7%.
Wow, which is, which is a huge jump, given the way the economy's growing these days, or, or not, right?
Massive.
How do we get there?
It's interesting. There's a lot of research showing that men are bigger risk-takers than women. Now, I talked to an economics professor in, in Britain. Her name is Alison Booth, and she had cooked up an experiment to look into this male-female risk gap. She randomly assigned a bunch of first-year economics students to either single-sex classes or co-ed classes. So there were all-female groups, all-male groups, and mixed, all randomly selected. Then, she had each of the students take a test to determine their baseline level of risk aversion, and then after eight weeks of class, she gave all the students the same test, and here's what she learned.
We found that the girls who'd been in single-sex groups all the way through the term were behaving the same as the boys who were in single-sex groups.
So it was only the girls who were in the higher educational groups who were making fewer risky choices.
That's amazing. Two months away from boys or men and women want more risk.
Women seem to compete better when they're competing against women. And once you bring men into the equation, they kind of dial it down a little bit. That's what we're seeing in a lot of the research.
That's wild. So get me back to patents and innovation. How do we get there?
Well, you know, here's one thought. If I'm a Google or a GE or the US government, and I truly want to maximize my resources, really get the most out of all my employees, I might try something that's so old fashioned that'll strike a lot of people as truly repugnant. I might actually segregate my workforce. I might actually let my sharpest women set up shop separately away from the men and just see what kind of wonderful stuff they can produce on their own.
You know, I was going to give you a hard time, but it'd be actually interesting. I don't know. Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. We'll see you in a couple of weeks.
Okay, Kai, thanks very much.
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Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
