Women: Good Inventors, Bad Bargainers
It's a well-known fact that the employment rates and wages are higher for men than for women. In our study we also show that gender-based differences in compensation exist in knowledge-based professions, such as those linked to the production of technological inventions, without comparable differences in terms of output quality being present.
Data on 12,129 inventors coming from 23 countries (US and Japan included) who registered their inventions at the European Patent Office show that women are merely 5% of inventors. In Italy they are 6%; Israel (12%) has the highest percentage of women inventors. Not only they are utterly under-represented, they get paid less than men, without the compensation divide being justified by the technological performance of their inventions. So while women and men are equally skilled in their work, their compensation systematically differs. The pay is different for equal characteristics of women and men inventors, i.e. for comparable educational attainment, past productivity, number of hours worked and position within the company hosting the innovators.
A more precise framework emerges by looking at family status: women inventors are particularly at disadvantage when they are married and live with children that are less than 12 years of age. Why? The information gathered through the survey excludes that this is a matter of simple discrimination vis-à-vis women. The fact of being a woman inventor is not per se correlated with a significant difference in compensation with respect to men. And it's not an issue of enjoying lesser outside options, when you have a family with small children. And it's not the fact of being more likely to quit the job because if you have kids, since single mothers are not as much at disadvantage as those with partners and children. An explanation that finds support in the data is that married women with children are likely to bargain less than men over their compensation. The combination of child care duty and partner's income, usually the larger one within the couple, reduce the marginal utility of women's income, and this hampers efforts at bargaining for a better deal. More simply put, women inventors seem to behave coherently with Babcock & Laschever's theory (2003), which argues that women that are either married or living with their partners are less likely to be hard bargainers than men.