WASHINGTON – The patent side of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is packed with Chinese, Vietnamese, and other ethnic Asian employees said to be the result of subtle discriminatory personnel practices, according to a source who asked to remain anonymous.
Among the supervisory patent examiners in various art units (groups of technologies), up to 60 percent of the personnel are said to be ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asians, while at the worker level, patent examiners in various art units are comprised about half of ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asians, according to this source.
A concern associated with this Asian tilt at the PTO may be the safety of our country’s technology in classified areas such as nuclear weapons, biotechnology, radar, guidance systems, computers, communications, and ordnance, among other technologies.
The general validity of the claim—that large numbers of ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asians are employed at the patent office—was confirmed by examining surnames in the telephone lists for the entire PTO and for particular unclassified and classified art units, which examine specific technological areas.
Various Asian surnames were searched and the number of employees with that surname were totaled throughout the PTO. See Table 1, below, for the results of that preliminary survey.
The selected examples below are provided only to illustrate numbers of PTO personnel having Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian surnames, and are not all inclusive. Nothing is implied as to these particular names.
Table 1. Selected Examples of PTO Employees Having Various Asian Surnames
(Surname, followed by number found for each surname)
Chang: 16
Leung: 4
Chen: 18
Liu: 6
Chung: 8
Ly: 10
Dang: 11
Nguyen: 279
Do: 11
Pham: 26
Duong: 18
Phan: 20
Ha: 9
Ton: 8
Hoang: 8
Vo: 15
Huynh: 15
Vu: 21
Kim: 32
Wang: 9
Kwon: 3
Wong: 15
Le: 57
Wu: 10
The summary census figures for the PTO as a whole partially mask the Asian tilt of the Patent Office.
In a June 2000 speech by Commissioner of Trademarks Anne H. Chasser, the PTO staff total was given as about 6,300, with Asians making up about 17 percent of the workforce.
Two years and six months later, an article in the Dec. 2002/Jan. 2003 issue of Diversity Careers in Engineering & Information Technology gave the PTO staff total as about 6,500 with Asians making up about 20 percent of the workforce.
Taken together, these two sets of figures imply that over 220 Asian employees joined the PTO during that two-year, six-month interval.
However, according to the source, the total workforce figures and census obscure the Asian tilt of the Patent Office side of the agency.
In the Trademark side of the agency, the source claims that a high percentage of employees are lawyers and that, consequently, a much smaller percentage are Asian, compared to the technically oriented Patent Office.
The source claims the high preponderance of ethnic Chinese and other Asians in the Patent Office is a cumulative result of subtle and invidious discrimination by hiring supervisors—a large percentage of whom are themselves Asian—combined with humiliation of non-ethnic Asian employees, causing non-Asian employees to leave.
Hiring supervisors, many of whom are themselves Chinese or Vietnamese, or of other Asian ethnicities—are said to give preference to applicants of their own race and ethnicity, the source said.
Likewise, Asian supervisors are said to humiliate or otherwise make the way difficult for non-Asian employees, with the result that non-Asians leave the Patent Office and create vacancies that supervisors say demonstrate a shortage of employees.
When interviewed, the source expressed concern that security at the patent office may not be sufficiently tight to prevent sensitive technology from being transferred to China or to other Asian countries by one means or another.
During the preparation of this article, a spokesman for the PTO, Mr. Richard G. Maulsby, was questioned about the percentages of workers of Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian ethnicities in the agency overall, about the percentages of Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian ethnicities working in classified art units of the Patent Office, and whether patent examiners working in various classified art units have access across-the-board to all classified patent applications and classified patents. Mr. Maulsby promised to obtain answers for the questions.
After the initial five written questions were posed to Mr. Maulsby, representatives of the PTO declined to return subsequent phone calls and no answers to the questions were forthcoming.
It is unclear to what degree classified patents and patent applications may be accessed through the PTO computer system by patent office insiders having various levels of access privilege. ###
Reprinted from The Justicegate News-Messenger; used with permission. This article published originally on Aug. 5, 2003. Free license granted to reprint and redistribute.
Ken Breedlove, Investigative Writer
The Justicegate News- Messenger
This is the first of a series of articles on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
