In Canada, 1 in 8 AI Inventors is a Woman

March 23, 2022

March 23, 2022 ・ 5 minutes reading time

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) conducted a study to measure how their female inventors were faring in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and compared it to the global average. The report found that the Canadian share of female inventors in AI patenting lagged behind the rest of the world.

During WIPO’s IP Gender Gap Seminar Series (America’s region) held on October 14, 2021, Sean Martineau, the Acting Director of Business Improvement Services at the CIPO, shared main findings of the CIPO report on gender imbalance in AI, and introduced two new indicators they developed to track progress in the field.

Video: Mr. Martineau’s presentation during the Intellectual Property Gender Gap Webinar (Americas).

The report linked more than 85,000 worldwide patented inventions (published between 1998 and 2017) to WIPO’s World Gender Name Dictionary to identify the gender of inventors. The report found that Canada lagged behind the world average – only one out of eight Canadian AI inventor is a woman in comparison to the world’s one out of four.

In the Artificial Intelligence field, one inventor out of four is a woman in the world, against one out of eight in Canada.

To help track of potential improvement to the participation of women in patenting, two new indicators were developed to compare the gender imbalance trend with the world:

1. The Gender Classification Index (GCI)

The GCI rescales the number of inventors of each gender to 100 in the first year and recalculates the number of inventors in subsequent years against this base. This offers easy-to-read values of the evolution of each gender. Go to minute 06:20 of the video above.

2. The Relative Participation of Women (RPW)

The RPW provides an indication of a country’s prominence of women in patenting relative to its proportion of patents in the sector of interest. A negative RPW value indicates that the country is performing below the world average, while a positive value suggests a better-than-average participation of women in patenting. Go to minute 09:30 of the video above.

Do you want to learn more about Canada’s science, technology and innovation experience? Check our selection of innovation and IP-related studies on the country.

Related resources

Guidelines for producing gender analysis from innovation and IP data

Disclaimer: The short posts and articles included in the Innovation Economics Themes Series typically report on research in progress and are circulated in a timely manner for discussion and comment. The views expressed in them are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of WIPO or its Member States.