Race and Gender in the USPTO: Schuster’s Hard Data for Hard Issues

[I asked some of my RAs to write guest posts this summer, lightly edited by me.  This one is by Jennifer Black, a 3L at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law]

Intellectual property rights are just that: rights.

Much like other rights, however, they have been unequally granted to people based on factors outside of their control throughout our country’s history. Intellectual property is a means for upward mobility of individuals who, through their own ingenuity, creativity, or otherwise, contribute something of value to our society. It is this exchange of benefits that the patent system is built upon. However, when certain individuals are less likely to reap the rewards of their inventions, they are both disincentivized from creating as well as from engaging with the patent system. Although the extent of these biases is yet unknown, research regarding the subject has been conducted with the intent of identifying and remedying inequity.

The scope of this inequity is difficult to comprehend except by collecting, analyzing, and comprehending the data. Mike Schuster and his coauthors did just that in his article, An Empirical Study of Patent Grant Rates as a Function of Race and Gender (published version in the American Business Law Journal), which examines the patent granting rates as a function of inventors’ races and genders. As scientists and engineers, patent practitioners and examiners will undoubtedly appreciate the amount and quality of his data.

Do Machines, and Women, Need a Different Obviousness Standard?

This blog post addresses two different articles that might at first blush seem to be very different. The first is Ryan Abbott's new article Everything Is Obvious, which explores the implications of machine-generated IP for the nonobviousness standard of patentability. Abbott argues the inventiveness standard should be adjusted to take into account the new reality that inventors are frequently assisted by machines or, in some cases, are machines. The second article is Dan Burk's Diversity Levers, published in 2015 in the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy. In the article, Burk argues the standard for nonobviousness should be adjusted to take into account the unique mindset and institutional situation of female inventors. (To be clear, Burk is not coming at this issue out of the blue. He has previously written about feminism in collision with copyright, arguing that copyright can be used to suppress feminist discourse).

Abbott's thesis is that, in comparison to machines, humans are all a little less skilled, so a human-based obviousness standard will necessarily lead to too many patents if machines are commonly employed. Burk's point is that, in comparison to men, women are typically more risk-adverse, so a male-based obviousness standard will necessarily lead to too few female-invented patents.

Dan Burk: Do Patents Have Gender?

This is a guest post by Allison Tait, a Gender Equity and Policy Postdoctoral Associate with the Yale Women Faculty Forum, who has previously posted on Written Description. A few comments from me follow below.

Dan Burk wants to find out whether or not patents are gendered. Since everything from Happy Meal toys to energy bars and tool kits can be gendered, a reasonable feminist would not be surprised to find that patents are in fact gendered. The real question is how they are gendered.

Kara Swanson: Feminism, Corsets, and IP

This is a guest post by Allison Tait, a Yale 3L with a Yale Ph.D. in French literature. Allison writes about women's property and marriage regulation and is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.

What do feminism, the corset, and intellectual property have in common? Quite a bit, it turns out, according to Kara W. Swanson (Northeastern Law) in her latest paper, Getting a Grip on the Corset: A Feminist Analysis of Patent Law. For Swanson, feminine interventions in patent-protected technology converge in the corset. The corset involved women as both consumers and litigants. The corset constructed gender by shaping the feminine form into a graceful silhouette with a small waist. And the corset narrated gender by calling into question the divide between public and private in Egbert v. Lippmann—the 1881 “corset case” that provided a foundational examination of the public use doctrine. The case turned on the question of Francis Lee Barnes’ right to her deceased husband’s patent for an improvement in corset springs. Problems abounded for Francis because the Court cast her as a public woman at a time when the public space of the market belonged to men and the private sphere of domestic relations to women.