Bridging the innovation gender gap: analysis under EU merger control

For this session, Ece Ban (University of Oxford) and Carolina Weber (Banda) (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition) will be presenting their paper 'Bridging the innovation gender gap: analysis under EU merger control'. 

In this paper, Ece and Carolina examine the structural forces that drive gender-biased outcomes in AI and healthcare innovation. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies alongside EU merger decisional practice, Ban and Banda argue that the innovation gender gap is not an incidental market failure but a systemic distortion in the direction of innovation. They explore how gender considerations can be meaningfully integrated into merger review - at the stages of market definition, theory of harm, and remedy design - within the existing EU framework.