Customer Profile

This study was conducted at the initiative of the National Women’s Business Council. The National Women’s Business Council (NWBC), with its offices located in Washington, D.C., is a bi-partisan federal advisory council created to serve as an independent source of advice and counsel to the President, Congress and the U.S. Small Business Administration on economic issues of importance to women business owners. Members of the Council are prominent women business owners and leaders of women’s business organizations. The Council’s mission is to promote bold initiatives, policies, and programs designed to support women’s business enterprises at all stages of development in the public and private sector marketplace – from startups to significance.

Problem Statement

One of NWBC’s current priorities was to examine in-depth the relationship between intellectual property and women-owned businesses.   The objectives of this study were:

1. Quantitatively define the number of women entrepreneurs applying for and receiving patents and trademarks.

2. Analyze the differences in the number of women applying for and receiving patents and trademarks as compared to men. Analyze sub-groups of women.

Delixus Solution

An optical disk containing data on patents granted between the years 1975 and 2010 was obtained from the United States Patents and Trademarks Office. Weekly USPTO database reports on patents were also downloaded.

Multiple sources were used to gather names of men and women from all over the world.
  • • U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.female.first
  • • U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/dist.male.first
  • • U.S. Social Security Administration: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html
  • • Japanese Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Korean Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Chinese Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Hindi Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • French Names, Source; 20,000names.com
  • • German Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Spanish Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Polish Names, Source; 20,000names.com
  • • Persian Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Russian Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Yiddish Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Greek Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Canadian Names, Source: familyberry.com
  • • Brazilian Names, Source: familyberry.com
  • • African Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Italian Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • United Kingdom Names, Source: 50 British women’s names, BabyNames.co.uk
  • • Turkish Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Arabic Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Irish Names, Source: 20,000names.com
  • • Unisex Names: familyberry.com

    • • A Data Warehouse was prepared using the ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) process. The structure of the Warehouse was prepared in accordance with the available data to facilitate loading and then querying the data for the desired results while maintaining data integrity.

    • The data was successfully loaded into the database following Data Extraction, Transformation and Cleaning.

    • The first sort used only the names that were exclusively female or male.

    • Separate sorts were used for the primary inventor and the non-primary inventors.

    • The changing demographics of the United States due to immigration from Japan, Korea, China, India and other countries that showed a significant and growing participation in the patent process.

    • A comprehensive and exhaustive segmentation analysis of all 464 Patent Classes contained in the USPTO database was conducted to determine the share of patents granted to women.

    • The USPTO database for the top 25 Classes as determined by the number of patents granted to women was interrogated for each of the years 1975-2010.

    • Categories with the sharpest increase in patents were identified.

    • Of particular interest was the increase in patent activity by women in specialized fields such as surgery and high-tech sectors like multiplex communications which have broad technological implications for macro-economics.

    • A regression analysis was performed on the data to identify longitudinal trends as well as identify benchmarks.

    • Patents filed versus patents granted were analyzed and a comparison was made with the data for men.

Benefits

This was a benchmark study about the participation of women in US Patents and Trademarks. The results of the study were used by the Obama white house to set policies to encourage women entrepreneurship.