Does Working Women’s Causes Innovation: An Untouched Reality?

Abstract

Working women play a vital role in all fields of lifestyle and are the pillars of society. Women’s workforce is the key to economic boom, innovation, research and development, growth and prosperity in modern societies. Globally, governments spend billions of dollars to promote the workforce, to enhance their country’s economy and innovation. This research aims to contribute to the knowledge on innovation by working women globally and to investigate how working women affect the process of innovation, using the number of patents and trademarks as innovation indicators. The empirical study adopted a two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation and generalized method of moments (GMM) with and without robust standard errors. Panel data of 136 countries for the period 1996–2016 was used. The results of this study show that working women positively and statistically significantly explained the patent and trademark, which is a proxy for innovation with other control variables (per capita income, education, research and development, technology, article, industry, and foreign direct investment). Overall, the findings show that working women have a positive effect on innovation – they exert a positive and significant effect on patents and trademarks. The regression results based on GMM and system GMM (SGMM) show how working women influence trademarks and patents. Specifically, the GMM reveals that the regression coefficients of patent and trademark positively affect innovation, with all variables being positive at the 1% level, indicating that the current level of patent and trademark is positive. This implies that working women have favourable economic participation in innovation. This study contributes to the cross-over of knowledge on innovation and working women and reduces the existing scarcity of information on the subject.