Scientific and Technological Performance by Gender: A feasibility study on Patent and Bibliometric Indicators

This report summarizes a project carried out for the European Commission aimed at assessing the feasibility of producing patent and bibliometric indicators by the gender of the inventor/author. It would appear to be the first study of its kind, and the results provide some pioneering measures of sex-disaggregated S&T output and productivity. The approach developed to genderize the data was based on identifying the sex of the first name of the author or the inventor. To do this, a comprehensive “first name database” was created, containing first names commonly used in each of the six EU countries selected for the study, and assigning a sex to each first name (some names of course can be used for both sexes). This database was then applied to two datasets. The first was the set of patents published in 1998 by the European Patent Office which related to 100.000 inventors from the 6 EU countries selected for the study (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and UK). The second dataset was a sample of roughly 30.000 authors of scientific publications. The report is structured in two volumes. Volume I is the analytical report, presenting a detailed analysis of the indicators calculated using this approach for the six Member States in the study. Volume II is the methodological report, describing the creation of the first name database and the development and testing of the methodology for producing sex-disaggregated indicators of patents and scientific publications.