Female inventors double in last 20 years: UKIPO report
Over the past 20 years, the proportion of female innovators worldwide has almost doubled, but there’s still a lot of work to do, according to a report released by the U K Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
Released yesterday, October 1, “ Gender profiles in worldwide patenting” reported that historically, 2-3% of inventors worldwide were female, but this has risen since 1960 to reach 6.8% in 1998 and has almost doubled since to reach 12.7% in 2017.
Now, more than one in five patent applications name at least one female inventor and the proportion of patent applications for which there are at least as many female inventors as males has risen from 3% in 2000 to 8% in 2017.
The majority of female inventorship appears to be in the form of an individual female on a male-dominated team. However, the proportion of patent applications which have several female inventors has more than doubled, from 2% in 1998 to 4.5% in 2017.
Tim Moss, chief executive of the IPO, said: “While it is great to see the trend improving there is still a long way to go; we must work harder to tackle the root causes of the difference and increase efforts to encourage and inspire more women to innovate, invent, design, create, and then maximise their commercial value through the IP system.”
Biotech leads the way
Between 1998 and 2017, women contributed to almost half of the patent applications in biotech, pharmaceuticals and organic chemistry.
A report from the US Patent and Trademark Office last year, which came to the same conclusion, suggested that women inventors remain confined to areas in which women “have traditionally patented”, rather than breaking into male-dominated sectors.
Electrical engineering took the bottom spot, with less than one in 10 applications having at least one female inventor.
Universities take the lead over companies, with higher proportions of female inventors named on patents, although both have shown an upward trend between 1998 and 2017.
The percentage of women patentees in academia has increased from 15% to 20%, while in industry the figure has risen from 6% to 10% in the 20-year period.
Sarah Kostiuk-Smith, European patent attorney at Mewburn Ellis, said: “The gender disparity is undoubtedly in part attributable to gender disparity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics [STEM] careers: quite simply fewer women study STEM subjects than men to higher degrees and that has a knock-on effect on who fills the research and development jobs that tend to underpin the inventions for which patent protection is sought.”
Even factoring in the gender disparity in employment, the figures for female inventorship seem low, added Kostiuk-Smith.
“Women account for just over 20% of the core STEM workforce in the UK, but only 11% of inventors and that number is not rising especially quickly,” she warned.
It’s a similar story in the US, where women made up 28% of the workforce in the science and engineering industries in 2015, but only 12% of all patent inventors, according to the USPTO’s report.
Kostiuk-Smith added: “It is therefore very important that companies and universities continue to make efforts to ensure that teams entrusted with cutting edge research are gender diverse, and that women’s contributions to inventions are recognised and celebrated rather than sidelined.”
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