Female inventors over time: Factors affecting female Inventors’ innovation performance

The aim of this paper is to explore the collaboration of female inventors, how it affects their innovation production and whether it influences their innovation impact. Empirical knowledge of how inventors collaborate in co-patenting collaborations holds an important key to innovation development. In this article, we report on an analysis of international inventors and patents granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) between 1978 and 2019. We investigate the structure of inventors’ networks—particularly those of female inventors—over time using social network analysis and address the gender patterns of collaboration. It can be observed that while female inventors’ overall involvement in patenting activity is not that high, the share of female inventors increases over the time period in question from 1.2% to 8.9%. We also estimate panel data regressions on the number of patents and the citation rates of the patents at an individual level. Our results show that although all inventors benefit from a more central network position within the co-patenting network in terms of their innovation output, the positive influence is greater for male inventors than female inventors. In addition, when inventors collaborate with inventors from more diversified countries and regions they contribute to more patents and their patents are more cited.