Search

The under-representation of women in science and technology is a matter of current great concern. Obtaining patent-based indicators by gender is crucial to analyse the situation of women in innovation, identify potential cases of gender inequalities, and support policy measures to promote gender balance. In this article we analyse men and women involvement in Spanish patents applied to the European Patent Office during 1990–2004. At least one female inventor is present in 18% of the patents; female contribution amounts to 9% of the total and 14% of inventors are women. Female involvement is above average in the academic public sector and in specific thematic areas, while the share of women in industry is very low. Female inventors show a stronger trend to collaborate than their male counterparts, as measured through their lower percentage of single-inventor patents and their higher co-inventorship index. Over the 15-year period under analysis, women’s involvement in patenting activity shows an upward trend, especially at universities and in cross-gender teams and the specialization profile of women tends to expand. Main difficulties in the development of patent-based indicators by gender are pointed out and the relevance of indicators to monitor the situation of women in innovation activity is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are crucial to the development of the European Research Area. However, unlike in the USA, the availability of quantitative indicators for individual HEI at the European level is severely limited by several methodological issues, data availability problems and national institutional constraints. The paper discusses strategies for collecting and validating data from different national sources; the limitations of the available data for different categories of indicators and, finally, the influence of the heterogeneity of the national HEIs on comparability at the European level. Based on the experience of two recently completed projects, the paper shows that, despite these problems, it is possible to collect relatively coherent data on European HEIs and to develop a set of consequential indicators. Further, it provides advice on how to exploit them for comparative purposes in a sensible way. It concludes by indicating areas where major improvements are urgently needed, and advocates a European S&T Indicators Platform to maintain and develop these data sets long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data on scientific productivity at institutes of the French INSERM and at biomedical research institutes of the Italian CNR for 1997 were analysed. Available data on human capital input and geographical agglomeration allowed the estimation and comparison of efficiency measures. Nonparametric envelopment techniques were used, and robust nonparametric techniques were applied in this work for the first time for evaluating scientific productivity. They are shown to be useful tools to compute scientific productivity indicators and make institutional comparative analyses. Taking into account a large number of methodological problems, a meaningful and rigorous indirect comparison is made possible. Several possible explanations of the observed differences in productivity are commented on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]