Washington (AFP)

Rem Koning, professor of business at Harvard, studies how biases hinder innovation.

Three years ago, his research touched him personally: his wife, suffering from a rare disease following childbirth, could not find a treatment made for young mothers.

"It came out of nowhere, and it was much more terrifying than it should have been," Koning told AFP about the diagnosis: postpartum pre-eclampsia, a disease characterized by hypertension.

"They can treat it with magnesium to lower your blood pressure, but you feel really bad."

The couple were also disappointed with the quality of the tech products for mothers and thought maybe this was because most medical innovations are designed by men without considering the needs of women.

All this led Mr. Koning to conduct a "machine learning" text analysis on more than 440,000 biomedical patents in the United States, filed from 1976 to 2010, the results of which were published Thursday by the Science journal.

By researching the names of inventors and linking them to patents, Rem Koning and colleagues found that patents filed by teams of female inventors were 35% more likely to focus on women's health.

The predominantly female teams were 18% more likely to design products with women in mind, from menopause to fibromyalgia.

But while the impact of women developing inventions on products related to women's health is significant, their representation is low.

- 6,500 inventions lost -

Female inventors represented 25% of patents filed over the three decades analyzed.

And the team estimated that if patents had been invented by an equal number of men and women over that time period, there would be around 6,500 more women-centered inventions in the market.

“Unfortunately, previous research has shown that women make up a minority of patents in the United States, both in biomedicine and in other fields,” Koning said.

"We were therefore not surprised, but we were disappointed by the little change in the figures".

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Despite years of improvement, women make up only 27% of all U.S. workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines according to the census.

And the gap in future products benefiting women's health needs is likely to persist.

In a commentary related to the study, Fiona Murray, who conducts research on innovation and inclusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed that innovators from different backgrounds identify research blind spots and improve performance. life and health of more people.

African-American ophthalmologist Patricia Bath thus obtained a patent in 1988 for a laser cataract removal system.

The invention has certainly benefited women, who suffer disproportionately from this eye disease, but also all those affected.

From a business perspective, Koning says a shortage of female inventors can negatively impact an economy struggling to recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

"When we don't give women the opportunity to invent or start new businesses, we lose new ideas, new technologies and therefore we end up with slower economic growth," he said.

"Not only is society losing the ideas of women, but female consumers are particularly disadvantaged."

© 2021 AFP