Cassatts in the Attic: Is there a gender gap in the commercialization of science

(This is a joint seminar organized by the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and HKU Business School’s academic area of Management and Strategy.)

The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) is delighted to present the CIE Frontier Research Series with the first virtual seminar “Cassatts in the Attic: Is there a gender gap in the commercialization of science” be conducted by Prof. Matt Marx, the Professor of Management & Organizations from the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University on November 22, 2023. Details are as follows:

Speaker:

Prof. Matt Marx Professor of Management & Organizations SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University Bio Matt Marx is the Bruce F. Failing, Sr. Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Management & Organizations in the Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management within the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University He also serves as the Faculty Director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and Boston University Questrom School of Business. Professor Marx’s research focuses on reducing barriers to the commercialization of science and technology, which he experienced firsthand during a decade as an executive and engineer at two startups in the speech-recognition industry that achieved a combined $1.4 billion dollars in equity value. His articles have appeared in journals from multiple disciplines including Management Science, the Review of Financial Studies, Organization Science, the American Sociological Review, and Science. His work on employee non-compete agreements and job mobility played a key role in policy reforms for Hawaii and Massachusetts. Press coverage includes the New York Times, BBC, The Economist, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Wired, Fortune, Forbes, and Bloomberg.

Abstract:
We analyze more than 70 million scientific articles to characterize the gender dynamics of commercializing science. The 15-25% gender gap we report is explained neither by the quality of the science nor its ex-ante commercial potential, and is widest among papers with female last authors (i.e., lab heads) when publishing high-quality science. We verify this in a subset of approximately 30,000 “twin” discoveries, for which papers we hand-code the gender of every PI. Results hold whether we define twins via adjacent co-citation or identical biological sequence and structure.

What drives this gap? Prior literature pointed to supply-side factors including reluctance on the part of women to patent or otherwise engage in commercial activity, but we cannot recover evidence for these. Rather, demand-side factors appear to play a key role. First, no gender gap is apparent when women self-commercialize their own discoveries instead of cooperating with existing firms. Second, the gender gap is larger at firms with a higher percentage of male inventors. Third, an increase in accessibility of scientific articles during the Obama administration does not close but rather widens the gender gap. Fourth, consistent with bias we find that discoveries by women that are cooperatively commercialized are of greater value, both using a crude proxy for “marginal” discoveries as well as when instrumenting for the likelihood of cooperative commercialization.

Enquiry:
Please contact us at cieinfo@hku.hk for any enquiries.

About CIE:
The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) is committed to connect research and practice, and create a vibrant and diverse community of entrepreneurs and innovators to drive positive changes in Hong Kong and Greater Bay Area.

With our teams and resources inside and outside Hong Kong, we aim at bridging the ecosystems in China and overseas.