Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>Women are underrepresented as inventors on U.S. patents (Toole et al. 2019, Toole et al. 2020). Although the gender gap is closing over time, it is not closing quickly. This suggests that there is a role for policy to help reduce invention and commercialization barriers for women. However, the potential effectiveness of policies to address this issue are unclear, primarily because the underlying causes of the gender gap are complex and not well understood. Recent research has begun to cast light on this issue (Whittington 2005; Ding et al. 2006; Murray and Graham 2007; Colyvas et al. 2012; Hunt et al. 2013; Meng 2018). There is some evidence that women are less successful during patent prosecution at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), all else equal (including the quality of the patent application). Aneja et al. (2021) find that women are much more likely to abandon patent applications after a first rejection at the USPTO than men. Further, this effect is greater for women applicants that do not have institutional support. This result suggests that women could disproportionately benefit from increased assistance at the USPTO, and that programs emphasizing assistance could increase the representation of women in the patent system. In response to the America Invents Act and following presidential executive order, the USPTO established the Pro Se Pilot program in 2014 to better assist inventors that file patent applications without legal representation. The program consisted of a specialized group of 15 patent examiners (called an art unit) and patent applications were randomly assigned to the treatment (the Pilot art unit) and the control (regular patent examination). Our paper uses the Pro Se Pilot randomized control trial to explore whether increased patenting assistance is an effective mechanism to help close the gender patenting gap.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199319941995199619971998199920002001200220032004200520062007200820092010201120122013201420152016201720182019202020212022202320242025 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question Sample Trial population and sample selection Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables Results Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Citation for use in academic references
