Standing on the Shoulders of (Male) Giants: Gender Inequality and Science-Based Invention

This paper proposes that the gender of innovators affects the extent to which their ideas are built upon. We argue that the lower rate of recombination based on women’s ideas is not only due to women’s lower productivity in science and technology but also to the fact that their ideas receive less attention. Testing this idea empirically is difficult because men and women tend to work on different projects whose recombination potential is unobservable. To address this challenge, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries in science—i.e., instances in which men and women made essentially the same discovery around the same time—and track the recombination of their scientific work into patented inventions. We find that scientific research has a lower technological impact if it was made by a woman than by a man. Overall, our results highlight that gender inequality shapes more than individuals’ careers. It also shapes the recombination of their ideas. We discuss the implications of our results for the literature on gender inequality and innovation.

Co-authored with Michaël Bikard

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