VICKI HUANG*, SUE FINCH** AND CAMERON PATRICK***
Recent recommended changes to Australia’s patent laws could
narrow the scope of patentable inventions. We argue this could have
a comparatively bigger impact on female inventors who we find
clustered in the life sciences. We examine 309,544 patent applications
filed with IP Australia (the majority from international applicants)
across a 15-year period (2001–15) and attribute a gender to 941,516
inventor names. Only 23.6% of patent applications in this dataset
include at least 1 female inventor. The average overall success rate
irrespective of gender was 75.0%, but the odds of success increased
with increasing numbers of male inventors on a team. The addition of
female inventors to a team did not have the same effect. We propose
that the gender disparity could arise from implicit gender effects
(examiner or patentee) during patent prosecution.