Data from the European Patent Office’s latest research points to a gender gap in innovation, with women representing only 13.2% of European inventors listed in patent applications. With 17.4% of female inventors, Slovenia ranks slightly above the European average.
The research is based on the percentage of female inventors listed in all patent applications at the European Patent Office from 1978 to 2019. The share of female inventors in Europe has increased in recent decades (from only 2% at the end of the 1970s to 13.2% in 2019 ), but there is still a large gender gap. The rate of female inventors is also much lower than the share of women among researchers and graduates of natural sciences and technology.
According to the survey, the rate of female inventors in Europe is higher than the rate of female inventors in Japan (9.5%), but lower than the rate of female inventors in South Korea (28.3%), China (26.8%) and the United States ( 15.0%).
Among the European countries with the highest share of female inventors, Latvia (30.6%), Portugal (26.8%), Croatia (25.8%), Spain (23.2%) and Lithuania (21.4%) stand out, with the lowest share and Germany (10.0%), Luxembourg (10.0%), Liechtenstein (9.6%) and Austria (8.0%) have
The largest proportion of European female inventors is in the field of chemistry, while the proportion of women in mechanical engineering is the lowest. In the chemical sector, more than 30% of patent applications in the fields of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals are female inventors.
The research concludes that in the period from 2010 to 2019, patent applications by universities and public research organizations have a significantly higher proportion of female inventors (19.4%) than patent applications by private companies (10.0%). In addition, the report reveals that women are more often found in inventor groups than among individual inventors, but tend to hold fewer leadership positions in these groups than men.
Source: SPIRIT Slovenia. The complete research in English is available HERE.