Women in Intellectual Property and Patenting in 2016

As part of its ongoing efforts to promote gender equality, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) released a special section on female inventors in its 2016 report of IP indicators. This is significant because past attempts at quantifying women’s participation in international patenting have been hindered by a lack of gender information. The report points out, “Women contribute to all fields of creativity and intellectual endeavor, highlighting the importance of gender equality for scientific advancement and innovation.”

To overcome the lack of gender information and extract female-specific data for the 2016 report, WIPO created a worldwide gender-name dictionary to help differentiate IP data by gender. The dictionary includes 6.2 million names for 182 different countries and was used to identify female innovators involved in the patenting process.

With the gender-name dictionary in hand, WIPO was able to determine that the overall number of female inventors in international patenting is on the rise. Since 1995, there has been a 12% increase (from 17% to 29%) in the number of PCT applications filed by women (calculated through 2015). Women have also flexed their IP muscles in the life sciences – filing more than half of all the 2015 PCT applications in biotech, pharmaceuticals and chemistry. The countries with the highest participation rates for women in international patenting are China and the Republic of Korea, which both have an even split between male and female inventors.

“These new, global data give us a baseline for understanding the role of gender in the filing of international patent applications, which is one metric used in measuring a country’s innovative capacity,” explained WIPO Director General Francis Gurry in a press release. However, the data also shows that true gender balance in the world of IP patents has a long way to go.

Currently, women are involved in less than 20% of all PCT applications filed in Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Africa and, globally, women remain in the minority for intellectual property rights related to the fields of engineering and transportation. In fact, WIPO estimates we will not reach full gender equality in international patenting until the year 2080. In the meanwhile, WIPO reports that “women patenting in the US, Germany and Japan are expected to determine to a great extent the progression of gender balance in the following decades.”

To learn more about WIPO’s 2016 World IP Indicators, check out the infographic below which was collated by Morningside IP.