Gender equality and innovation: evidence from UK companies

Pawel Bukowski and Hannah Yi Wei

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We investigate the effect of intra-firm gender disparities on innovation using a unique longitudinal dataset of UK companies from 1996 to 2019. Utilising within-industry and within-firm variation, as well as an instrumental variable approach, we examine the effect of gender pay gap and female representation at the top, on patenting activity - measured by their headcount, number of citations, and economic value. In general, our findings indicate that gender parity does not negatively impact patenting. However, in more recent data, we uncover evidence suggesting that a lack of gender parity adversely affects both the quantity and quality of patents.

Keywords: firm diversity; innovation; gender equality; gender wage gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05-14
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2179.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2179

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().