Mothers of invention? Meshing the roles of inventor, mother, and worker

Our focus in this study is on the social-structural and cultural barriers experienced by modern women inventors. Our aim is to discover and explore the constraints that inhibit women inventors from contributing fully to the process of innovation. Are there barriers and constraints working to make women's inventions and themselves as inventors invisible? Is this lack of recognition related to the fact that women inventors live in a patriarchal society and work as a minority group in a male-dominated field?A greater problem for women inventors than the barriers of time, finances, lack of technical skills and lack of support is a social structure that undermines the legitimacy of women's experiences as inventors. We found that women inventors interviewed for this study are reluctant to acknowledge the inventor label for themselves, no matter how successful they are as inventors. This may be rooted in societal denial of any role for women that might undermine the primacy of the socially circumscribed female role. The myth is thus perpetuated that women are not inventors, even among women inventors themselves. Voltaire's 1764 view, “There have been very learned women as there have been women warriors, but there have never been women inventors” (Alic, 1981: 305), seems to find support in Canada in the late 1980s.