Every year we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th. On this occasion, we examined this month the countries with the largest proportion of women cited as inventors upon filing the first patent applications.
According to statistics published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), even if the filings made by women increase over time, male filers remain largely ahead. Women represent only 16.5% of inventors for international patent applications via the PCT in 2021.
Among the top performers is Cuba, where 52.9% of inventors are women. However this country only files very few patent applications. Next on the podium are the Philippines (37.7%) and Portugal (34%). Second country in Europe, Romania has a share of 27.7% of women. Thailand (26.3%), Poland (25.2%), Turkey (24.2%), but also China (23.7%), Iran (23.2%) or Colombia (22.7%) are above the world average and ahead of France. France indeed comes in 28th position with only 18.1% of female inventors.
Behind France are the United States, Canada, Sweden and even Germany, all below the average, with 11.7% for the latter.
At the bottom of the ranking are Qatar (7%), Saudi Arabia (6.7%), Belarue (6.3%) and finally Egypt, in last position with a share of 1.9% of women in patent applications.
Source: https://www3.wipo.int/ipstats/
