Abstract
Do stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) incentivize female participation in inno- vation? We provide new evidence on this question using a unique database of Artificial Intelligence (AI) patents publicly shared by the USPTO. Our identification strategy lever- ages China's WTO TRIPs accession, which led to a stronger IPR in 2002. We find a significant rise in the number of female inventors and an increase in the number of patents with females in the inventor team vis-a-vis a control group of countries. We also found that post a stronger IPR, the quality of patents improved for Chinese AI patents with fe- male inventors in the team. Results are robust controlling for unobserved heterogeneity at country, technology class, and time. Additional robustness checks with synthetic control, coarsened exact matching, randomized inference and alternative control groups support the benchmark findings. Our results highlight that stronger IPR can be helpful in better gender division of labour thus benefitting society and innovation.