Gender dictionaries and PATSTAT

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Geert Boedt
Posts: 176
Joined: Tue Oct 19, 2004 10:36 am
Location: Vienna

Gender dictionaries and PATSTAT

Post by Geert Boedt » Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:06 pm

The PATSTAT team sometimes receives questions with regards to gender identification of inventors and applicants. Classical research topic that need gender profiling are often based on a need expressed by policy makers for hard evidence that stimulation programs to inspire girls and women to study and build careers in fields such as: science, technology, engineering and mathematics also have their anticipated outcome.
The proxy being that: if more girls and women study technology and science, then this should also be reflected in the workplace and consequently in more patents having female inventors (and applicants).
As we all know, bibliographical patent data does not contain information on gender. In order to enable gender based research, some researchers and patent authorities have developed and published gender dictionaries that link names to gender -there are a number of different approaches to do this-.
In this context and without going into further details, I would like to point to a PATSTAT compatible file (UK-IPO-Gender-Inference-Table-09-16) produced by the UK Intellectual Patent Office which is available at this webpage: https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... entorship
The file can without further due be imported in a PATSTAT data base and then linked via the person_id to for example the tls206_person table. Because person_id's are stable across PATSTAT releases, the file will match perfectly with later releases. (The Autumn 2017 release only had 2 person_id's that did not match because of corrections.) One has to keep in mind of course that "new inventors and applicants" will not have matches, but existing matches can be used for applications filed at a later stage.
For all further questions on the file, I refer to the colleagues from the UK Intellectual Patent Office.

Another source for gender dictionaries is WIPO. More information on WIPO research in that area can be found here: https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ip_inn ... tion_gap/
The data sources are available here on WIPOs' public GITHUB: https://github.com/IES-platform/r4r_gender (observe that there are currently-01/2022- 2 versions) For all further questions on the data, I refer to the colleagues from WIPO.

I also invite researchers that have created similar name-gender concordance tables to link their work in this topic. For future PATSTAT releases, (and without raising too much expectations) the PATSTAT team would like to hear your voice on whether you think it would be a good idea to incorporate such data into the PATSTAT delivery at the source.
Last edited by EPO / PATSTAT Support on Thu Feb 03, 2022 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: update with WIPO info
Best regards,

Geert Boedt
PATSTAT support
Business Use of Patent Information
EPO Vienna


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