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. 2024 Aug 8;19(8):e0305238.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305238. eCollection 2024.

Cosmetic patent and female invention

Jong Wook Lee  1 , Eunji Jeon  1 , So Young Sohn  1
Affiliations

Cosmetic patent and female invention

Jong Wook Lee et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

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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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Change in the number of cosmetic technology patents applied.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Changes in the proportion of cosmetic patents with the participation of women inventors.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Annual change in cosmetics patent application rate by the gender of patent inventors.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Proportion of patent application by the gender of patent inventors.
Fig 5
Fig 5
The annual trend of patent claims (top), backward citations (middle) and family size (bottom) by gender.
Fig 6
Fig 6. Four indicators for determining the number of topics in STM.
Fig 7
Fig 7. Proportion by topics.
Fig 8
Fig 8. Individual topic proportion by gender.
Fig 9
Fig 9. Topic proportion by gender over period on each topic by gender and year.
Fig 10
Fig 10. The distribution of citation by gender.
Fig 11
Fig 11. Kaplan-Meier curve of patents by gender.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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