Equitable innovation is needed for female medical treatments | World Economic Forum

Female research teams are 35 percent more likely than male teams to develop medical treatments that primarily benefit women, yet an examination of biomedical patents filed over a 30-year period revealed a significant shortage of inventions targeting women’s health versus the large volume of new products for male ailments, according to a recent study by Harvard Business School professor Rembrand Koning and colleagues.

With women representing only 13 percent of patent holders in the United States, the lack of female-driven inventions may well be having a direct impact on health outcomes, Koning says. If fewer inventors are focused on, say, personalized breast cancer treatment or ovarian cancer tests, fewer lives will be saved by the resulting innovations.

“You have all these women who have great ideas, but aren’t being included in the process of commercialization,” Koning says. “Longer-term, we need to shift the composition of who gets to invent and who gets to become a scientist.”

To better understand the potential volume of good ideas that never became inventions, the research team crunched biomedical patent data between 1976 and 2010 to discern inventor sex and determine whether the invention was targeted at a particular sex.

The team also analyzed a vast library of biomedical research articles published between the years 2000 and 2020. Those articles backed up the conclusions of the patent analysis, indicating that women were more likely to study topics and treatments that benefit women. Women are also significantly less likely to file patents than men, so many of the ideas in the papers the researchers reviewed never moved forward to the point of helping patients.

By analyzing previous research papers, Koning says, “we’re going upstream to see if there is a reservoir of ideas there that, if we fix this patenting problem, we can open the spigot and then those ideas would flow out. Our results suggested that there is.”

“Women are more likely to work on topics like endometriosis or cervical cancer, but they’re also more likely to find ways to adapt inventions for women in research on conditions like diabetes or atrial flutter—diseases that impact both sexes,” Koning says.

That means everyone is missing out from the lack of women inventors, Koning says. “Inclusion matters not just for who you work with, but also what your products and your strategies are,” says Koning. “You’re potentially losing out on insights from their lived experiences that might allow you to tackle different sorts of markets or different sorts of problems.”

In recent years, progress has been made toward gender parity in science, as more women enter STEM fields and enroll in technical degree programs. The shift started in the 1980s, fueled by changes at the National Institutes of Health that spurred more women to become scientists and discouraged biases among men in the field, Koning says.

While male inventors far outnumber women inventors, biomedical patents secured by women rose from 6 percent in 1976 to 16 percent in 2010. How might we make further progress? Making it easier for women to file patents would help. Providing additional mentoring and support, making sure women feel included in startup culture, and creating inclusive events at schools and technology transfer offices are a few ways to do that, says Koning.

The Global Gender Gap Report tracks progress towards closing gender gaps on a national level. To turn these insights into concrete action and national progress, we have developed the Closing the Gender Gap Accelerators model for public private collaboration.

These accelerators have been convened in ten countries across three regions. Accelerators are established in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Panama in partnership with the InterAmerican Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean, Egypt and Jordan in the Middle East and North Africa, and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

In 2019 Egypt became the first country in the Middle East and Africa to launch a Closing the Gender Gap Accelerator. While more women than men are now enrolled in university, women represent only a little over a third of professional and technical workers in Egypt. Women who are in the workforce are also less likely to be paid the same as their male colleagues for equivalent work or to reach senior management roles.

In these countries CEOs and ministers are working together in a three-year time frame on policies that help to further close the economic gender gaps in their countries. This includes extended parental leave, subsidized childcare and removing unconscious bias in recruitment, retention and promotion practices.