For 2018’s World IP Day the day was designed around a theme: Powering change: Women in innovation and creativity. The TL;DR is that while participation by women in the arenas of patents, trademarks, and copyrights improved nearly three-fold since 1990 numbers, there’s still a huge parity-gap between women and their male counterparts (and that final 17% may take some real striving to achieve):
The fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and chemistry show the highest rates of women named as inventors in international patent applications filed via WIPO, new figures indicate, as World IP Day 2018 celebrates women driving positive change across the globe.
New data reveal that in total, women were listed in 31 percent of the 243,500 international patent applications published by WIPO in 2017, up from 23 percent a decade earlier (see Annex 1
for all data).
WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said these new data show positive trends and underlined this year’s World IP Day theme “Powering Change: Women in Innovation and Creativity.” But he noted that a pronounced gender gap exists.
That doesn’t mean all is lost. For instance the European Patent Office has been producing a series of videos asking ‘Who is Your Favorite Inventor?’ including a channel of a couple dozen contemporary women inventors — see below. And of course we here at Adafruit also highly recommend our own Women’s History Month & Women in STEM series of blogs for more positive encouragement and inspiration on the associated topics.