USPTO Believes Children Are Our Future
The Patent Office, along with the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation and the Ad Council, launched a series of new ads this month to encourage children to invent stuff. The campaign is described in a recent article in the LA Times that features a video of the latest television ad.
The public service ads, which build off a campaign started last year and will appear on TV, radio, the Web and billboards, are aimed at kids between the ages of 8 and 11. The TV version features a boy showing off a very typical boy idea: bicycle tires with suction cups. Hint: it's not a real invention, as you could probably guess when you see the kid riding on the ceiling in the video above.
The idea is to use humor to inspire the next young Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. The ads tell kids, "Anything's possible. Keep thinking," and direct them to Invent Now, a social networking site sponsored by the same groups. Children can upload designs of their inventions, comment on other kids' ideas and play games. The site even walks them through the steps needed to get a real patent. It's like a mini-lesson in intellectual property law (which could come in handy if they're Scrabulous fans.)
Some of the 1.200 children who have posted inventions to the Invent Now website are girls, too, but there's always the risk that such well-intentioned programs and the media reinforce gender stereotypes by showing boys inventing "typical boy ideas" and girls inventing things for women.
Raising three girls, we've become keenly aware of gender stereotypes in our culture, so we decided to make a special effort to teach our girls that they can do anything.
A Girl Named Pants is a series of children's books I've written to push back against gender stereotypes and teach girls that they can do anything. She'll probably invent something, too, like these women inventors. After all, she can do anything!
Well of course the USPTO wants kids to invent stuff. Kids' inventions are simple. None of those nasty big specifications, large numbers of claims, interrelated inventions that require multiple divisionals or continuations, no significant prior art search, no genuses of chemical compounds.
The USPTO can then use its wonderful internal accounting scheme, under which every patent application counts as one unit (simple or complex, valuable or not) and chalk up one unit without doing any work.
Or the USPTO could change its examinenr production count scheme (as the examiners' union has been asking for years) and internal accounting performance standard to reflect practical reality, and provide more balanced incentives.
But advertising for kid inventions and setting rules to cap the complexity and value of what you can patent is more within USPTO management's competence.
Gender stereotyping goes both ways in our culture. There are just as many limiting stereotypes for boys as there are for girls.
I commend you for writing a book focused on only one gender and creating a sense of empowerment through esteem; however I would encourage you to include the other gender in your work as well.
Boys are at a greater risk in America than ever before, and some reports indicate that boys may be worse off now than girls ever were. It is great that you have jumped on the gender empowerment bandwagon, but I hope that you will consider equality and gender neutral writing in the future.
Clark, I agree that both genders are at risk. The better way to say it is that children are at risk. And while I had girls in mind when creating "A Girl Named Pants," more than 40% of the buyers of these books are boys. The only thing that makes Pants a "girls" character is that she is a girl. And, just as girls have always read books and watched shows with a boy as the main character, boys should be able to do the same with A Girl Named Pants. And, again, based upon the buying trends of the Pants books, they clearly have.
My sister has twin boys and she has told me that her kids love the Pants books, and she loves that her boys will grow up seeing girls as equal to boys.
It is my sincere expectation that Pants will help boys and girls alike to grow up as confident, courageous, and compassionate leaders.