Unlocking Women’s STEM Potential for Inclusive Innovation

At the 2025 Women and IP Symposium for Intellectual Property (IP) and Innovation Offices, Dr. Mercedes Delgado, Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and a Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), delivered a data-rich lecture highlighting the persistent underrepresentation of women in patenting, and what can be done to change it.

Her talk, titled “Inclusive Innovation and Growth:
Transforming STEM Women into Inventors,” focused on how innovation systems can better recognize and support women with scientific and technical expertise.

A Persistent Gap

Dr. Delgado began by outlining that only 9% of all patents globally can be attributed to women. Though this share is increasing, the pace is very slow. Based on current trends, it would take about a century for there to be an equivalent number of new women and men inventors.

This issue is especially evident in digital sectors, where women comprise only about 16% of new inventors in software, AI, cloud computing, semiconductors, and quantum technology combined patents. These fields together represent over 14% of global patents, making the gender gap in these areas particularly concerning.

Even though countries have made progress, the gap remains wide. According to Dr. Delgado’s analysis, from 2000 to 2020 the female share of new inventors in the world (and in the United States) increased by only 0.33% per year.[¹] At this rate, it could take over 275 years to reach parity in in the percentage of patent applications filed by women.

It’s Not a Talent Problem

Contrary to common assumptions, the low participation of women in patenting is not due to a lack of STEM skills. In the U.S., for example, more and more women are earning degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math, including at the PhD level. However, this growing number of qualified women isn’t translating into a similar rise in female inventors. For example, in 2020, women made up 36% of STEM PhD graduates, but only 19% of new inventors.

Universities: A Key Opportunity

Her research shows that U.S. universities are strong drivers of inclusion in innovation. In 2020, while they accounted for just 5% of all patents, they were the source of 14% of all new female inventors, highlighting their important role in supporting women in IP. Dr. Delgado highlighted a particularly promising channel: 30% of new inventors listed on university patents are PhD students, often co-patenting with their faculty advisors.[²]

The top inventor faculty account for just 2% of inventors but are listed on nearly 40% of all university patents. These “top inventors” play a key role in shaping future inventors. PhD students trained by them are six times more likely to become inventors than their peers (23% vs. 4%). Notwithstanding, even with PhDs, women are 17% less likely than men to become inventors, regardless of whether they were mentored by top inventors who were male or female. This suggests that systemic issues in women’s participation in patenting still exist. Universities need to do more to support women in turning their skills into inventions, in turn, including them more in the IP landscape.

Why Inclusion Matters

Dr. Delgado emphasized that inclusive innovation leads to better outcomes. More inventors mean more ideas, and more resilience in responding to challenges. Women may also identify unmet needs, such as in women’s health, an area that has been overlooked in medical research until recently.

“Inclusion is not just about fairness,” she said. “It’s about growth. We are wasting human capital when we don’t support talented women to become inventors.”

What Can Be Done

Dr. Delgado outlined practical steps that academic and research organizations could consider, categorized into supply-side and demand-side solutions [PDF].

Supply-Side:

• Improve access to top faculty and labs.
• Encourage more female faculty to become top inventors, as they are more likely to train female PhDs
• Spotlight successful student-faculty patent collaborations.
• Emphasize the economic and social impact of innovation.
• Provide more women with training in entrepreneurship and better access to commercialization resources.
• Highlight female role models to address self-doubt and confidence gaps.

Demand-Side:

• Use data to identify inclusion gaps in mentorship and patenting.
• Develop better tools to assess contribution and ensure proper inventorship acknowledgement.
• Share real examples of exclusion, such as Svetlana Mojsov, a chemist who helped discover the GLP hormone (used in obesity treatments) but was initially left out of key patent applications.

Measuring Inclusion

To help universities assess their performance, Dr. Delgado and her co-author Dr. Murray have created an Inclusive Innovation Scorecard. This tool helps institutions identify best practices and track progress. The scorecard was applied to the top 50 patenting U.S. universities and shows large differences in inclusivity levels. Interestingly, 8 of the top 10 most inclusive universities were located outside of major innovation hubs, suggesting that inclusive innovation can also help boost regions that are less developed.[³]

While universities are ahead of the general economy in terms of inclusion, her findings show there is still significant room for improvement, especially in STEM commercialization pathways.

Dr. Delgado closed her talk by urging IP professionals, institutions, and policy leaders to act, stressing that “the talent is there” and one needs to “build systems that support, recognize, and include it.”