“Necessity is the mother of invention,” goes the proverb. A gender neutral variant occurs in Plato’s Republic. By the Sixteenth Century though, the proverb was established in both English and Latin with Necessity having a female persona.

Sixty years ago, the post office of my Ohio childhood installed a curbside mail box with a chute. My mother observed that although the drop box was an improvement, it required a 5’ 4” woman like her to put the car in “Park,” slide across the bench seat, over the transmission hump and reach an uncomfortable distance to deposit mail. So she wrote a letter to the local newspaper saying that. The postmaster thereupon reconfigured his parking lot to place the drop box on the driver’s side of a newly created drop-off lane.

Another of my mother’s wished-for improvements was a kitchen shower stall. She said a mother with small children should be able to finish dinner, step into the stall with her child(ren), draw a circular curtain hung from an overhead track, disrobe, pull the chain connected to an overhead water tank, and wash off food that found its way onto clothes or body parts other than kids’ mouths, with a drain in the center of the floor to catch the runoff.

The point of the examples is that useful devices women might create are off the radar of businessmen who lead new product initiatives and experience the world differently. Stated simply, women remain underrepresented in the innovation economy and our world is poorer for it.

This truth came to mind as I read a white paper, “Manufacturing a High-Wage Ohio,” published by The Century Foundation. The paper’s author, Michael Shields, identifies troubling trends:

“Despite dramatic job losses, Ohio grew its share of the nation’s manufacturing workforce over the past quarter-century, as manufacturing jobs became more concentrated in the [Midwest] region.”
“Ohio was once among the nation’s wealthiest states . . . . Yet, Ohio is no longer a destination [for people or companies]—the state’s growth rate has lagged the nation’s by three quarters since the Great Recession. Ohio’s cities are actually shrinking.”
“Wage growth in Ohio has been nearly flat for nearly four decades. Since 1979, the bottom 60 percent of workers has lost ground compared to their counterparts a generation ago.”
“While manufacturing remains a better paying sector, factory wages have not kept pace with economic growth, and the manufacturing premium—the wage bump that manufacturing workers receive above other wage-earners—has shrunken.”
“Advanced manufacturing industries hold enhanced potential to create good jobs . . . . Yet the trends in advanced manufacturing jobs spell trouble for Ohio [because the rate of loss of these jobs (43% since 1990) exceeds the rate of loss of other manufacturing jobs (30%)]. Policymakers should be deeply concerned with the long-term viability of manufacturing jobs in general, but especially of advanced manufacturing jobs.”

The causes of these trends are firmly established and durable. They include automation, foreign competition, government currency manipulation and corporate capital allocation in favor of rapidly growing emerging markets. For example, Midwest-stalwart Caterpillar, Inc., today has 76 manufacturing plants overseas compared to 62 plants in the U.S. Since building its first plant in China in 1994, CAT now has 25 plants there.

Plato’s wisdom about necessity mothering invention should guide us. Ohio remains a prolific center of innovation. Residents of its principal cities and Pittsburgh created the fifth largest number of patents issued in the United States since 2000. Only cities in California, Boston and New York City surpass the Ohio/Pittsburgh cohort.

What if women had greater material incentives and technical support to invent new products? What would they create that we men overlook?

Ohio state government has an active economic development team, Jobs Ohio, funded by sales tax on liquor. Of nine Jobs Ohio directors, one is a woman. Of five regional staff team leaders, one is a woman. Of the 11 industry teams, two (military and government, and healthcare) are led by women.

Asian and European business cultures prefer men over women to an even greater degree than American business culture. So why not turn that to our advantage by incentivizing American women to create, patent and commercialize more products?

Ohio participates in the Invention Convention, a nonprofit organization intended to nurture children’s interests in innovation. https://inventionconvention.org/ohio/about/invention-convention-worldwide. Why not do more to encourage adult women to be innovators?

We cannot reclaim an economy in which hundreds of thousands of men and women earn top tier wages and salaries by operating tools and machines to mass produce goods. That era is over. Computer programmed machines, wherever located, are more efficient and require fewer operators. We can, however, harness the brain power of all our citizens to invent and patent-protect useful tools for living in our time. That is the necessity we face.