On November 24 and 25, 2025 WIPO hosted the second edition of the Global Research Experts Meeting (GREM) 2025 on Improving Women’s Participation in Innovation, Creativity, and IP. The event brought together economists, legal scholars, data scientists, policymakers, and women innovators from more than 20 countries to examine a central question: Why are women still underrepresented in innovation and intellectual property (IP), and what will it take to close participation gaps?
Across contributions from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, one message resonated strongly: women innovate everywhere, driving advances in science, creative industries, digital entrepreneurship, tradition-based products and services, and green technologies. Yet despite the breadth of their contributions, women remain significantly underrepresented in formal IP systems.
Researchers explored the structural forces shaping this reality, from access to finance and institutional visibility to the influence of AI-driven tools, and emphasized the need for more data, targeted policies, and more inclusive institutional practices.
The discussions coalesced around five major insights for improving innovation ecosystems:
An Interdisciplinary Investigation
A defining feature of GREM 2025 was its interdisciplinary lens. Economic analysis, legal review, sociological research, and policy evaluation were brought together to provide a holistic understanding of the innovation ecosystem.
Economists presented evidence showing that countries with higher levels of women’s participation in IP-intensive activity often experience stronger productivity and more resilient innovation systems. Legal scholars highlighted how IP frameworks, many designed in historical periods with narrower assumptions about who innovates, can unintentionally overlook contributions originating from collaborative teams, community-based knowledge systems, or early-stage entrepreneurial activity where women are more strongly represented.
Sociological perspectives added crucial nuance, exploring how informal networks, cultural expectations, and workplace dynamics influence who is recognized and credited. Together, these perspectives highlighted that participation gaps in innovation and IP cannot be understood or addressed through any single discipline alone.
Sex-Disaggregated Data in IP
Sex-disaggregated data in IP is expanding beyond patents to include other IP types such as trademarks, offering a more complete picture of women’s inventive and creative contributions. Most IP offices still do not systematically collect this information, making it difficult to assess gender gaps across the broader IP landscape. However, as offices begin to gather sex-disaggregated data more consistently, researchers are now able to uncover new insights across multiple IP types. For example, a recent study from Chile uses sex-identified trademark data to examine differences in application outcomes and finds that women, on average, have higher initial trademark registration success rates than men.
While this study represents an important early step, more disaggregated data is needed to fully understand the magnitude and dimensions of the gender gap in IP. Improved and systematic data collection is also essential for evaluating whether policies designed to increase women’s participation in innovation and IP are truly effective. Without comprehensive data, both the scale of the challenge and the impact of policy interventions remain difficult to measure.
Evidence: Human Stories Behind the Data
Quantitative data laid the foundation, and case studies from Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Malawi, and Nigeria added valuable insights and context. These case studies explored how structural barriers intersect with individual journeys: scientists navigating complex research hierarchies, entrepreneurs transforming informal solutions into scalable businesses, creators building audiences online while facing fragile IP protections, and inventors confronting funding and mentorship gaps despite creating high-value inventions.
The stories highlighted that innovation is not only technical, but also personal, relational, and shaped by institutional culture. Effective policy must therefore address both data gaps and the lived realities behind the numbers.
Digital Innovation: Opportunities and Risks
Discussions highlighted how digital technologies, including AI, platform economies, and advanced analytics, are helping to reshape women’s engagement with IP systems.
These tools offer unprecedented opportunities: access to global markets, new financing models, visibility for early-stage innovations, and automated pathways to documentation and IP management. In many regions, women entrepreneurs are leveraging digital commerce and online creative platforms to bypass traditional barriers.
However, these same technologies can pose significant risks, such as gender-blind datasets and opaque AI models undercounting women’s creativity or misattributing contributions.
Policy Implications
As GREM 2025 concluded, a clear message emerged: improving women’s participation in innovation, creativity, and IP requires coordinated, system-wide reforms. Evidence from multiple countries suggested that women remain underrepresented in patenting, design leadership, and commercialization pathways; gaps shaped by sectoral dynamics, institutional norms, legal frameworks, and resource distribution.
Building on this evidence, researchers from around the world emphasized the urgency of strengthening inclusive support structures and data-driven policymaking to accelerate progress. They recommended institutionalizing IP policies that take into consideration the particular barriers faced by women and the systematic collection of sex-disaggregated IP data to better inform strategic decisions. Targeted financial mechanisms, such as IP commercialization grants for women-led MSMEs, were identified as key tools for addressing persistent structural barriers. Researchers also underscored the importance of mainstreaming IP education throughout product development, expanding mentorship networks for women innovators, and encouraging diverse innovation teams within both public and private sectors. Together, these interventions were presented as essential components of a more equitable and dynamic innovation ecosystem.
Ultimately, participants in GREM 2025 agreed that inclusive innovation and IP systems are a critical foundation for national and global innovation performance and long-term economic growth. To explore the full conference program, along with author biographies and research abstracts, you can consult the program annex, available here: IPGAP: GREM 2025 Conference program