Stronger IPR, Better Inclusion? Impact Of WTO Accession On Female AI Inventors in China

Do stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) incentivize women’s participation in innovation? We provide new causal evidence on this question using the USPTO’s Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset. Our identification strategy exploits China’s WTO TRIPS accession, which led to a substantial strengthening of IPR in 2002. Our results show that post-WTO accession, the number of patents with at least one female inventor in China rose by 95%, and the number of individual female inventors increased by 111%, relative to other countries. We also find significant improvement in patent quality measured by forward citations, strategic importance, and patent impact scores. Heterogeneity analysis shows that gains were concentrated in less complex AI technologies such as computer vision and knowledge processing, with smaller increases in frontier areas like machine learning and evolutionary computation. Our results are robust to alternative control groups, synthetic controls, coarsened exact matching, and randomized inference tests. We identify three mechanisms underlying this surge in female innovation. First, the share of domestic female inventors on patenting teams rose sharply. Second, patents with female inventors increasingly originated from private firms rather than state-owned enterprises, reflecting market liberalization effects. Third, systematic investment in women’s higher education expanded the pool of qualified female researchers. Together, these findings suggest that while China’s WTO accession provided an exogenous policy shock, complementary institutional reforms were essential in enabling women’s participation in the innovation economy. Overall, the results highlight that stronger intellectual property rights when embedded in supportive institutional contexts can foster both technological progress and gender inclusion.