In today’s issue of Science (link coming soon, not yet online), a study by folks from UC Berkeley, MIT and Harvard says that female academic life scientists file for and obtain patents at 40 percent the rate of male life scientists. The authors looked at the patents and publications of 4,227 randomly selected US academic life scientists who earned their PhDs between 1967 and 1995.

They came up with this number after they controlled for factors that may affect someone’s likelihood to patent, such as publication rate (ie productivity), how active the scientist’s university is in patenting (ie the university’s culture of commercialization), the number of collaborating co-authors (ie how large the scientist’s network is) and the scientific field (ie some fields patent more than others).

What’s causing this difference? It’s not as if the women were doing lower impact research. The authors found that the men and women had similar per-article citation counts and the journal impact factors for the women were slightly higher than that for the men.

So the researchers did some interviews at a university with male and female life scientists and found that most of the women reported not having many contacts with industry, making it more of a hassle to figure out how to go about patenting. And they worried that doing more commercial activities would hurt their careers and take time and energy away from research and teaching. However, among the junior, untenured faculty, women and men tended to have the same positive attitude toward patenting. So perhaps over time, we’ll start to see the gender gap in patenting shrink.