Michelle Lee, former USPTO director (Photo: Jason Doiy / ALM)

The House Judiciary's Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet held its first hearing of the 116th Congress on Wednesday.

The title was “Lost Einsteins: Lack of Diversity in Patent Inventorship and the Impact on America's Innovation Economy.” It was a follow-up to last year's passage of the SUCCESS Act, which directed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to study and report on the number of patents obtained by women, minorities, and veterans. Academic studies indicate those populations are underrepresented among patent owners. The Senate's IP subcommittee is scheduled to tackle the same subject next week.

Here are six takeaways from Wednesday's hearing:

➤ Welcome back to Capitol Hill, Michelle Lee. PTO Director Andrei Iancu is presiding over an agency that is now, under a congressional mandate, formally studying the issue of women and patents. Wednesday's hearing brought the reminder that his predecessor, Michelle Lee, is an actual pioneer in the area.

Lee ticked off a list of initiatives she helped roll out as PTO's first woman director: a STEM education initiative, an invention camp for kids, pro bono and law student assistance for inventors, the opening of three regional offices to improve community outreach and a Girl Scouts intellectual property patch.

That wasn't enough to please the subcommittee's ranking member, Martha Roby. “Do inventors know that these programs even exist?” she asked, explaining the pro bono and law school programs are “buried in the website.”

Lee at least got credit from her hometown representative, Zoe Lofgren. She said the PTO's Silicon Valley office has been “a huge success. So thank you for the efforts you made.”

➤ Maybe a white male genius isn't the best branding for a diversity initiative? Subcommittee Chairman Hank Johnson, D-Georgia, said the Lost Einsteins title “speaks directly” to the issue at hand: “When women and minorities are not in the innovation pipeline, or if they leave because they don't feel welcome, we are losing sources for increased innovation,” he said.

Michigan State economics professor Lisa Cook confirmed that economic output could increase by 3 percent to 4 percent if the innovative process were more inclusive. “I look forward to talking to you more about finding the lost Einsteins, as well as the hidden figures such as Katherine Johnson,” she said, referring to the pioneering NASA mathematician. None of the House members followed up with her about Katherine Johnson.

➤ Get ready for demographic data collection at the PTO. Some academic studies have inferred the gender of named inventors from government and commercial databases. That's harder to do for racial and ethnic minorities.

“Unfortunately, the PTO does not collect demographic data on inventors,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, noted early on in the hearing. He then asked Cook: “Is there enough data to understand the scope of under-representation of racial minorities in patenting?”

“There's not,” Cook quickly answered. Lee agreed that “collecting the data is critically important,” saying it could provide “a road map” for policymakers, agency leaders, the private sector and academics. It was a good point, though maybe not the optimal metaphor this week for House Judiciary members.

➤ Climate change is needed at tech companies. Lee said that, in her experience, inventive companies that convene brainstorming sessions with relevant team members are more productive than those that leave potential inventors on their own.

Cook said the cultural problem goes further than that. “Tech workers in the U.S. have demonstrated to protest sexual harassment and misconduct, lack of transparency, including forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims, workplace culture, and pay opportunity and inequality,” she said.

Cook said she can and has explained to companies that they're leaving money on the table if, for example, patent teams remain single sex, rather than co-ed. “But on the other hand there has to be enforcement. The EEOC enforcement,” she said.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, asked Lee, who spent nine years at Google before joining the PTO, if she could comment on “the culture at these institutions.” Lee sidestepped the question.

➤ The secret sauce: A good patent prosecutor. Ayanna Howard is a former NASA researcher who's now chair of Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing. Yet it wasn't until she founded Zyrobotics, an artificial intelligence startup for childhood education, that she was able to obtain a few patents.

“I discovered a little bit of a trick. I hired a great patent lawyer,” she told the subcommittee. Although expensive, she learned that patent examination is a lengthy process requiring persistence.

“Unfortuantely, the price tag is not very sustainable for a startup company in the education space,” she said. That's especially true for startups run by women, she said, which aren't favored by venture capitalists in the first place.

➤ Qualcomm is promoting women inventors—and its role in 5G technology. Qualcomm's senior vice president of engineering, Susie Armstrong, helped pioneer the company's commercialization of packet data, and showed the subcommittee the vintage mobile phone on which she demonstrated web surfing in 1997.

Armstong is now also a member of Qualcomm's government affairs group, and she made sure to emphasize the company's role in “5G foundational technologies,” name-checking 5G seven times in her five-minute opening remarks.

Armstrong outlined four key areas of for inclusion at Qualcomm: promoting STEM education—such as with Qualcomm's Thinkabit Lab, where young students “create their own Internet of Things invention;” expanding recruiting to universities with higher black and Latino populations; focusing on employee retention; and promoting inventorship among employees.