Woman’s place

UK IPO report shows that the proportion of female inventors has almost doubled in a 20-year period, but there is still a long way to go

Maura O’Malley, IPM

It is a perennial question: why does the number of females named on patent applications remain stubbornly low? Well new figures from the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) should make for encouraging reading – the proportion of patent applications which have several female inventors was just 4.5% in 2017, but this is double the figure for 1998. ¹