Michael bikard

Abstract

We argue that gender inequality in science and technology means that ideas are less likely to be built upon if their author is a woman versus a man. Testing this empirically is challenging because men and women tend to work on different ideas whose potential is largely unobservable. To address this challenge, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries in science – i.e., instances when a man and a woman have published the same idea around the same time – and track the citations to their subsequent publications in patented inventions. We find that scientific publications receive fewer patent citations, that is, they have a lower technological impact, when their main author is a woman. This gap is not driven by women’s lower propensity to produce patented inventions based on their own ideas, but rather by other inventors’ lower likelihood to build on those ideas. Additional analysis suggests that supply-side factors alone, such as the greater saliency of men’s work, are unlikely to drive our results. Rather, inventors seem to pay more attention to men’s ideas. Our research highlights that gender inequality shapes more than individuals’ careers. It also shapes the extent to which their ideas are used to create new technologies.