Indian Orchard IP counsel leads charge for innovation diversity.

Byline: Pat Murphy

An in-house lawyer at Eastman Chemical Co. is leading the charge to correct a glaring lack of gender diversity among inventors.

Michelle Bugbee co-chairs the Women Inventors Subcommittee for the Intellectual Property Owners Association. At its annual meeting in September, the IPOA released the subcommittee's "Gender Diversity in Innovation Toolkit" a call to action for businesses in the U.S. and abroad to take the internal steps necessary to "capture" the full intellectual potential of their technical workforces.

The 96-page toolkit cites one study in particular as sounding a clarion call for change. According to the National Science Foundation, only 12 percent of recognized innovators in the U.S. are women despite women earning 53 percent of Ph.D.'s.

The toolkit lays out a four-step plan for businesses and organizations to address diversity with respect to women and other groups. The first step involves increasing awareness and support at the executive level and among female and other diverse members of the technical workforce.

Second, organizations are called on to assess the "root causes" of the problem.

Step 3 involves developing short- and long-term programs to address relevant root causes, whether they involve the attitudes of managers, IP professionals and other inventors, or relate to workplace culture and in-house processes. For example, it proposes programs tailored to eliminate bias, intimidation or simple confusion in a company's invention submission/patenting process.

The fourth step involves implementation and monitoring of programs.

Bugbee, senior counsel at Eastman Chemical's offices in Indian Orchard, teamed with her subcommittee co-chair, Sandra Nowak of Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. attorney Mercedes K. Meyer in leading the effort to draft a blueprint for companies and organizations to remedy the lack of gender parity in innovation.

Bugbee says the toolkit provides a concrete action plan that addresses an undeniable problem.

"There are plenty of women out there who are innovating and doing things, but they're not patenting," she says.

She recently spoke with Lawyers Weekly's Pat Murphy.

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Q. Why is gender diversity in innovation an important issue that needs to be addressed?

A. There's a large part of the technical workforce that's not having their ideas captured, necessarily, and that results in a lost opportunity cost. [A recent] equity in innovation report from the Institute for Women's Policy...