Publications

Journal Article

Recently, questions about gender gaps in science have extended to academic technology transfer. Using systematic data on US medical school faculty, the authors capture both behavior and performance, examining the hypothesis that women are less likely than men to commercialize their research findings.

The authors pooled faculty invention data from ten departments in three Academic Health Centers from 1991 to 1998—a period when patenting had become prevalent and other researchers note that a gender gap was pronounced.

Rather than focusing on patenting, the authors capture the first step in the commercialization process, as well as the subsequent successful licensing of faculty inventions to a company.

The authors find no significant gender differences in the likelihood of reporting inventions or successfully commercializing them. The authors do find differences in the number of inventions reported, however, with women disclosing fewer inventions than their male counterparts. The results demonstrate that gender effects are highly conditioned by employment context and resources.

The authors attribute differences in our findings with regards to gender to the use of outcome measures that capture both behavior and performance, and the inclusion of a more extensive set of control variables.