Gender-specific patterns in patenting and publishing, Fraunhofer ISI Discussion Papers

Measuring the output of men and women in  science and technology has previously  been mostly restricted to case studies or small-scale surveys. Based on an analysis of  patent and publication databases, this paper applies a methodology to systematically  assign the gender to the names of inventors and authors. The method is applied to 14  countries. The results of this investigation reveal substantial differences across coun- tries in terms of women's relative contribution 1  to science and technology, with the cen- tral European countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland all ranking comparatively  low in this respect. We also examine trends over time, showing that the data on  women's share of publications – unlike the results for patents – hardly increase over  time for the already better-performing nations.