This paper examines gender differences in the returns and trade-offs of inventor careers, motivated by women’s underrepresentation in innovation and the long-standing question of whether women can truly “have it all” — an ambitious career, a partner, and children. Using Finnish administrative data linked to patent records, I document a gender pay gap of over 20% among patent inventors, consistent with prior research. Novel to the literature, I show that this gap does not stem from differential returns to patenting but reflects broader labor-market disparities. The gap emerges years before inventors’ first patent filings and closely mirrors income differences among comparable non-inventors. Using a matched triple-difference model, I show that the absolute income gains from patenting are substantial and broadly similar for women and men, while the relative gains are even higher for women. Non-pecuniary trade-offs, however, appear to fall disproportionately on female inventors. Women delay childbearing during the ‘crunch time’ preceding their first patent filing and ultimately have fewer children than their matched control group counterparts, whereas male inventors exhibit modest opposite patterns. These findings suggest that greater career trade-offs, rather than weaker financial incentives, help explain women’s underrepresentation in innovation.

This paper examines how innovation affects firm survival, scale, productivity, and market position by comparing first-time patenting firms to otherwise similar firms that never patent. We further distinguish between granted and rejected patent applications to separate the returns to innovation from those attributable specifically to patent approval. Firms with granted patents exhibit substantially lower exit rates, roughly 15 percentage points lower than unsuccessful applicants, indicating large extensive-margin effects. Beyond survival, granted patents are associated with pronounced intensive-margin responses: firm scale, measured by revenue, value added, and wage bills, is approximately 25-30 log points larger. Firms with rejected patent applications also grow faster than non-patenting peers. In contrast, we find no systematic effects on firm productivity or the capital-labor mix, suggesting that post-innovation growth is driven by the expansion of existing activities. Finally, we document significant gains in industry-level market shares among successfully patenting firms.