Women inventors: the legacy of medieval guilds

The share of women inventors remains significantly lower than that of men inventors in both developed and developing countries. This paper studies the gender bias in patenting activity, using a unique dataset that matches Italian administrative employer-employee records both to patent data from the European Patent Office (1987-2005) and to municipality-level information on medieval guilds from the Italian Central State Archive. We empirically verify whether the low female propensity to patent can be explained by the traditional local conception of women's role in society, which we measure with the share of women in guild founders in the Middle Ages. The results indicate that the presence of women in medieval guilds is associated with a higher probability of observing a female inventor and a higher number of yearly patent submissions by women.