The Role of Reviewer Characteristics on the Diversity of Successful Applicants
研究美国专利商标局专利审查员的特征如何影响女性发明人的申请成功率，发现高工作负荷会降低女性申请获批概率，对关注评审公平性和组织多样性的学者有参考价值。
In their efforts to foster diversity and talent, organizations, banks, and venture capitalists utilize the expertise of reviewers to evaluate applications from a broad range of applicants. Reviewers make decisions under different types of cognitive load, such as the necessity to aggregate complex information and workload pressure. To cope with the stress, reviewers might use automatic biases to make decisions faster, which can result in lower organizational diversity. We explore the characteristics of reviewers in a particular setting—patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We leverage quasi-exogenous variation from the random assignment of patent examiners, allowing us to find the causal impact of applicant gender and examiner characteristics on the application success rate. We find evidence that applicants with more female-sounding names have a 3.6-percentage-point lower likelihood of patent approval. We find that a high workload of the examiner leads to a decrease in the likelihood that the patent application of a female inventor would be approved, consistent with theories on coping strategies when experiencing cognitive load. Our results extend to applications filed by teams of inventors. These results suggest that it is essential to manage the stress related to reviewers’ workloads to guarantee a variety of successful candidates. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17910 .