A geography of women inventors in Italy, 1861-1939

[This paper studies women’s participation in innovative activities during the deep societal changes of twentieth century Italy. It accomplishes this by tracking female inventors among the more than 330,000 patents registered in Italy between 1861 and 1939. The resulting dataset allows to disaggregate women’s inventive activities across industries, provinces, and social backgrounds. Despite accounting for only 0.8% of total patents, the number of women patenting increased steadily from 1861 to 1939. The patenting growth has been comparable to that of male-only patents up to 1920 but started to slow down compared to that of men during Fascism. The quality of inventions registered by women was only slightly lower than men’s, and the gap was gradually reduced. Also, women patented in a wide variety of technological sectors. This suggests that entrepreneurial women were able to innovate, but that marriage and gender power relations prevented them to fully unleash their inventive potential., This paper studies women’s participation in innovative activities during the deep societal changes of twentieth century Italy. It accomplishes this by tracking female inventors among the more than 330,000 patents registered in Italy between 1861 and 1939. The resulting dataset allows to disaggregate women’s inventive activities across industries, provinces, and social backgrounds. Despite accounting for only 0.8% of total patents, the number of women patenting increased steadily from 1861 to 1939. The patenting growth has been comparable to that of male-only patents up to 1920 but started to slow down compared to that of men during Fascism. The quality of inventions registered by women was only slightly lower than men’s, and the gap was gradually reduced. Also, women patented in a wide variety of technological sectors. This suggests that entrepreneurial women were able to innovate, but that marriage and gender power relations prevented them to fully unleash their inventive potential.]