Data and Code for "Closing the gender gap in patenting: Evidence from a randomized control trial at the USPTO"

Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across inventor gender, driven primarily by an increase in successful negotiations by women inventor teams via the use of examiner's amendments. While both men and women applicants benefited, the probability of obtaining a patent was over 12 percentage points greater for women (or, 33 percent relative to the mean grant rate in the control group), and the effects were largest for U.S. inventors and new U.S. inventors. Our results suggest that a portion of the gender gap in patenting could be eliminated through additional assistance during patent examination.