WIPO’s 2024 World Intellectual Property Indicators report includes data on the inventor gender gap in PCT applications: a mere 17.7% of inventors listed in published PCT applications in 2023 are women.

The 2024 World Intellectual Property Indicators report (WIPI), recently released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), includes interesting data for 2023 on women inventors named in published PCT applications worldwide.

The inventor gender gap in PCT applications

According to the WIPI 2024, in 2023 women made up 17.7% of all inventors listed in published PCT applications.

About 36.2% of published PCT applications named at least one woman as inventor in 2023 (up from 21.4% in 2009), while 95.9% applications named at least one man (97,6% in 2009).

The proportion of women inventors named in PCT applications varies considerably between states: top 20 for number of women inventors are Spain (26.8%), China (24.4%), and Turkey (22.8%) are the 2023 top countries; Italy ranks 13th with 15.4%. Somewhat surprisingly, Sweden and Germany both rank among the bottom five.

Fields of technology

Women inventors are most represented in the areas of Life Sciences, but even in those as only 18 to 32% of inventors. The top ten fields of technology with the highest proportion of women named as inventors in PCT patent applications are Food chemistry (32.4%), Biotechnology (31%), Pharmaceuticals (29.8%), Analysis of biological materials (28.6%), Organic fine chemistry (25.7%), Basic materials chemistry (22.1%), Macromolecular chemistry and polymers (20.6%), Micro-structural and nano-technology (19.9%), Digital communication (19.4%), IT methods for management (18.4%).

More about the gender gap in European patent and design applications

On the European front, in November 2022 the European Patent Office (EPO) published  Women’s participation in inventive activity – Evidence from EPO data, (read about it here); this is the first, and for the moment the only, EPO study to examine the gender gap among inventors in European patent applications in the 38 European patent member states, and was focused almost entirely on all European patent applications filed between 1978 and 2019.

The EPO’s study compared the presence of women among inventors in European patent applications with their presence in employment in general and particularly in science, and concluded that the result of the comparison is far not only from being gender-balanced, but also from catching up with the numbers of women active in economic and scientific activities in general.

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), that manages EU-wide trademark and design registrations, published in April 2023 for the first time a report on women in design (read about it here), focusing on women designers and their participation in the European Union’s registered Community design system. The report found that in 2021 only 24% of designers in the European Union states considered were women, and only 26% of designs registered as Community designs by EU-based owners in the same year were attributed to at least one woman designer.

It will be interesting to observe whether EPO and EUIPO will continue to regularly collect and publish global and European data and analysis on the gender gap in patent and design applications.

Related content

Flash news – Women in design: new study by the EUIPO

Flash news – Women and patents in Europe: new EPO study provides data, evidence and insights on gender gap

Events – Cultivating Leaders: WIPNE 2024 event with SIB and Unismart in Padua