Shifting how academics are evaluated could make old injustices more damaging, says John Whitfield
A vast amount of evidence shows that pretty much every aspect of the process by which ideas get turned into money is biased against women.
At the beginning of their research careers, female PhD students face more barriers to entrepreneurship than their male counterparts. At the other end of the path to commercialisation, patents with female authors are less valued and cited less often than they would be if they had male authors. In Europe, male-only teams win more than 90 per cent of venture capital funding. These disadvantages are compounded by race, class and disability.
The extent to which women have been shut out of innovation—and the cost to society—is shown clearly in a paper this year by economists Marlène Koffi and Matt Marx. They searched more than 70 million scientific articles published between 1800 and 2020, and detected work that had been commercialised by matching papers and patents that cited each other and had the same author.
Papers with a female last author—a spot reserved for team leaders in many disciplines—were 29 per cent less likely to be commercialised than those with a man listed last. This seems not to be a question of quality: those female last authors garnered more citations on average. And it does not seem to be down to commercial potential: when multiple papers reported the same discovery at the same time, those with female last authors were cited more frequently but were a third less likely to be commercialised.
Koffi and Marx gauged the commercial potential of research using a combination of citation counts of papers and patents and a machine-learning algorithm trained to look for patterns in authorship, language and other variables that tend to be associated with successfully commercialised research. They found that the better the science the bigger the gap, with gender differences increasing alongside commercial potential. In other words, a lot of good science is going unexploited.
Business bias
The two economists suggest many companies have a male-biased search image when they go looking for research to apply. It is notable that the bias against commercialising work led by women was only present for patents filed by pre-existing companies. Male and female researchers were equally likely to start a company to commercialise their own work.
The gender gap in commercialisation widened in the 2010s, when the US government began requiring open-access publication of federally funded research, making it easier for companies to trawl the literature.
If there was ever something that the market ought to be able to fix, this is surely it. The evidence points to a great deal of innovative potential going unrecognised; an investor that managed to tap that well ought to clean up. On the other hand, waiting for capitalism to solve social injustices does not have a great track record.
Ironically, places less exclusively focused on the bottom line may be better placed to reap the rewards of an inclusive approach. It’s easier to imagine a university-based business incubator or a public innovation funder making a serious effort to see past prejudices than a bunch of tech bros whose models for success and social networks look like themselves.
There are already initiatives targeted at specific groups, such as Horizon Europe’s Women TechEU programme, which supports female-led startups. A 2020 report commissioned by the UK’s public innovation agency recommended a combination of such targeted schemes with broader efforts to promote equity, diversity and inclusion in schemes open to all-comers. Making innovation more equal would probably do more for growth and productivity than many more complicated or grandiose initiatives.
As well as the issue of how to get the most for society from research, findings such as Koffi and Marx’s raise the question of how such inequalities affect researchers. Publicly funded academics are increasingly expected to make commercialisation and knowledge transfer part of their work and are judged on that. The more important the emphasis on impact becomes, the more disadvantaged female researchers are likely to be if the commercialisation gap remains.
This goes beyond commercialisation to other areas where researchers and their institutions seek to turn their work into economic and social benefit. A recent analysis of a Swedish mission-oriented funding programme found women’s research interests tended to be less aligned with the funder’s priorities than men’s, leading to lower application rates from them.
Efforts to reform research assessment have focused on moving away from publications and citations as the primary markers of academic achievement. Policymakers must be careful that moving the goalposts does not make success harder for some researchers than others.
John Whitfield is the opinion editor at Research Professional News
This article also appeared in Research Europe