Last update - 00:00 26/02/2007
A thorny patent law for female inventors
By Tali Heruti Sover
Yanisky-Ravid is about to publish a book on research she conducted as part of her doctoral studies. The focus of her investigation was the alarming absence of women from the patent registries.
"I had a feeling that women invent wonderful things, but do not profit from them," says Yanisky-Ravid. "Men are usually the ones who profit. The data I collected shows that in the United States and Europe, women inventors constitute close to 20 percent of all inventors. I decided to be optimistic and expected to find that just 10 percent of Israel's inventors were women."
To her astonishment, Yanisky-Ravid found that Israeli women accounted for just 1.9 percent of the inventors who registered their intellectual property in 2000-2005.
"This number has several structural causes," she says. "The law does not discriminate between male and female inventors, but in practice, women have far fewer opportunities."
Paragraph 3 of the Israeli Patent Law states that an invention can be patented if it is an industrial or agricultural product or process. The law was enacted in 1968 and was extended to the technology sector a year later, when its evolution stopped. Inventions in other sectors cannot be patented.
"Statistical data indicates that fewer women than men are employed in the technology and high-tech sectors," explains Yanisky-Ravid. "The restricted definition of what can be patented reduces the number of women who can register as inventors. If the definition were broader and included education, psychology and clinical communication, for example, we would see more women's names.
"The inability to register a patent is a practical encumbrance. A woman who invents a new diagnostic method can copyright the method, but cannot patent it. Copyright protection is much weaker [than patent protection] and does not grant the same power and status as patent recognition. A patent is a monopoly, while copyrights simply forbid copying. The law must be extended to include additional fields to help women assume their rightful place.".
Not everyone agrees entirely. "It's not so simple," says Dr. Meir Noam, head of the Patent Authority. "I agree that the overwhelming majority of inventors are men, but this is not due to discrimination, but rather the division of the market. The sectors in which patents can be registered employ mostly men. This is simply the reality."
Could the law be amended to include other fields?
"It could, but cautiously. In Israel patents can be registered only [on inventions] from the science fields, and not from the humanities fields. It is easy to verify whether a scientific process or product is really something completely new. This is much more complicated in the humanities fields. Can we really determine if a teaching, diagnostic or marketing method exists nowhere else? Extending patent registration [to these fields] could result in the cheapening of the patent and harm any field in which certainty is critical."
Beyond the narrow applications of the Patent Law, women face another hurdle in that patents in Israel are not necessarily registered in their inventor's name, as in the U.S., but rather in the owner's name.
"This could be the inventor," says Yanisky-Ravid, "or his workplace, which becomes the owner. If, for example, a women invents something at a high-tech company, the company owns the intellectual property rights to the patent, which is registered in its name. The inventor - man or woman - has to demand the recording of his name alongside that of the company, and everyone knows that men are more assertive in this respect. They know the future ramifications on both their earning power and professional reputation, while women tend to avoid confrontations with their employers. In other instances, only a development team leader's name is registered with a patent, and not all the team members' names. If that were the case, women inventors would jump to 12-14 percent of the population."
Noam disagrees. "Women inventors in the fields included in the law are usually opinionated and stand up for themselves," says Noam. "I do not believe that a professor at a university will have difficulty insisting on the recording of her name beside a patent registered by the university in whose laboratories the invention was made."
Among the university researchers who have registered patents, women actually constitute 40-50 percent of inventors. "Women who invent at academic institutions enjoy a protective environment," says Yanisky-Ravid. "This policy should be adopted everywhere.