Coming from afar and picking a man’s job:Women immigrant inventors in the United States

Edoardo Ferrucci, Francesco Lissoni and Ernest Miguelez

Bordeaux Economics Working Papers from Bordeaux School of Economics (BSE)

Abstract: Based on an original dataset spanning over 20 years of patenting at the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), we identify the gender, residence, and nationality of inventors, based on which we also identify migrants and natives in the United States, as well as stayers (non-migrants) in the migrants’ countries of origin. We find that the share of women over the total number of US-resident inventors (or WIR: Women Inventor Rate) is generally higher for migrants than for US natives, so that the former have contributed significantly to the increase of WIR in the US over the past quarter century. At the same time, the WIR for migrants is higher than that of stayers, which suggests that migration to the US represents an opportunity for high-skilled women to undertake a career in R&D, notwithstanding the obstacles they may face, and irrespective of their country of origin. This intuition is reinforced by an analysis of women inventors’ technological specialization, which reveals that female migrants are better represented than natives and stayers in men-dominated fields.

Keywords: STEM migrants; High-skilled migrants; Inventors; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J16 O15 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme, nep-ino, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
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Working Paper: Coming from afar and picking a man’s job:Women immigrant inventors in the United States (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:grt:bdxewp:2020-01

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