Gender, occupational diversity of R&D teams and patents generation: an application to Spanish firms

This paper studies the relationship between gender and occupational diversity in R&D teams and their capacity to generate patents. It is based on an extensive sample of 4,085 firms from the Spanish Community Innovation Survey over the 2004‒2014 period. Applying an exponential Poisson regression that controls for endogeneity through the generalised method of moments, the empirical results show that gender diversity has an ambiguous effect. Although it affects patents negatively, this impact is non‐significant for patents with international protection. Patent generation is however positively affected by the diversity of categories in the R&D teams. Hence, the key question is not gender per se but rather the occupational status of the R&D teams.