Pins and Pistons : Gender and Patenting during the French Industrialization

Studying the full universe of nearly 390,000 French patents filed between 1791 and 1900, I show that the nineteenth-century gender patenting gap arose less at the patent office than through unequal access to practical knowledge, collaborators, and time across the life course. I identify 4,165 women inventors using gender-specific honorifics, classify patents with machine learning, reconstruct the full co-inventor network, and link 1,076 women to civil vital records.

Patents involving at least one woman made up 1.75 percent of the French record, higher than in Britain or the United States, and women from a broad social range patented across all twenty technology classes. What produced the gap lay before the application was filed.

Three mechanisms shape it. Direction: within each inventor's birth department, the female employment share predicts her patent sector about twice as strongly as industry size. Women patented where women worked. Scope: at first collaboration, the share of output outside an inventor's home technology class rose by 35 percentage points and persisted. Women were more likely than men to remain outside the network (76.5 versus 68.8 percent isolates), and family ties made up 35.8 percent of women's collaborative links versus 8.8 percent of men's. Timing: married women filed their first patent at a median age of 41.5, compared with 30 for women unmarried at first patent; 83 percent of mothers patented only after their last recorded child was born. Later cohorts filed their first patent about four years earlier, as access costs fell with the 1844 reform and women's legal and educational opportunities expanded.