Much research has established that women inventors are systematically disadvantaged in the research process – they produce both lower patent numbers compared to male inventors and lower citation counts arising from poorer co-patenting network positions, negative stereotypes, and a “return deficit” from similar network positions as men. However, we argue that women can “overcome” these barriers by producing patents that are both disruptive and produce higher market value for firms. To study this phenomenon, we create intra-firm inventor co-patenting networks for 629 U.S. public firms in the bio-pharmaceutical industry from 1995 to 2013. Our data include 39,614 inventors, of which 9,276 are female and 30,338 are male. We use multi-way fixed effects models to control for unobserved heterogeneity and a battery of robustness tests to demonstrate the consistency of our results. Our results show that, despite their network disadvantages, women do create more disruptive patents of higher market value by employing mechanisms including superior use of network reachability and knowledge diversity.
