Actually the strongest claims about the gender imbalance from the nytimes article are "And a 2006 study found that female academics in the life sciences — Ms. T

Actually the strongest claims about the gender imbalance from the nytimes article are "And a 2006 study found that female academics in the life sciences — Ms. Tariyal’s field — were filing about 60 percent fewer patents than their male colleagues." But when looking at the referenced research[1], the methodolgy is:" One possibility is that men and women do qualitatively different kinds of research. In particular, if women are risk averse in their research choices (15), there may be a gender difference in research Bpatentability.[ We believe such a difference would manifest in the extent of scholarly impact. To explore this possibility, we created a data set of the 23,436 articles published by the women in our sample and matched each paper (by publication year) with a randomly drawn article from the pool of male scientists_ papers. This yields a sample of articles with a 1:1 gender ratio. We then examined by gender and year, the average number of citations and the journal impact factor (JIF) of these papers. We found that the per-article mean citation count for male scientists is very similar to that of women (table S3). Moreover, the gender gap in average JIF actually favors women (average JIF for male: 4.06; average JIF for female: 4.12). Overall, there is no evidence that women do less important work based on standard measures of scientific impact." Which sounds like a way to measure the average quality of research(via mean), not for comparing the highest quality research by males and females, which is what counts for VC investments(and probably for patents) - and which should have high correlation to risk preference of males/females. [1]http://haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/papers/ding9_gender%20differences%20in%20patenting.pdf http://haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/papers/ding9_gender%20diffe...