Cosmetic patent and female invention.

Majority customers of cosmetics are female. Would this imply a high proportion of inventors of cosmetics technology is female? Would the inventor's gender be related to the characteristics and quality of corresponding patent? This study tries to identify manifestation of gender equity in cosmetics technology in terms of patent application and grant, technical characteristics, and its performance. We apply topic modeling, zero-inflated Poisson regression, and survival analysis to patents related to cosmetics that were applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office from 1970 to 2016. The results show that women's participation in cosmetic inventions is becoming active and has experienced many changes in technical characteristics, but in terms of performance, it is still sluggish. This study is expected to contribute to deepening our understanding about gender issues in technology development.

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Copyright: © 2024 Lee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.