Finding Marie Curies: Steps Towards a More Inclusive Innovation and IP ecosystem

During her keynote lecture at WIPO’s first Global Research Experts Meeting on Improving Gender and Diversity in Intellectual Property (IP) and Innovation, Professor Myriam Mariani discussed insights from her past and current research (with Prof. H.C. Kongsted, Prof. Karin Hoisl, Prof. Olof Ejermo and Dr. Ioana Igna). The lecture focused on the state of the art, future challenges and research topics that experts need to address to reduce the number of lost Marie Curies.

How far are we in understanding and closing diversity gaps in IP and innovation? And how much further de we still need to go?

Women remain underrepresented in patented inventions, and while statistics provide a snapshot of the issue, they capture only the tip of the iceberg. To create meaningful change, we need to dig deeper into the mechanisms behind these disparities, explore their origins, and address the barriers that hold women back.

There are both economic and social reasons that motivate the need for increasing women’s participation in innovation:

• Expanding the Talent Pool: Ideas are becoming harder to find, and societies cannot afford to overlook half the population's potential. Over-reliance on the male talent pool while underutilizing female talent limits the diversity, quantity and quality of ideas (Bloom et al. 2020; Park et al. 2024).
• Freedom of Choice: Becoming an inventor should be a personal decision, free from constraints related to gender. Women’s underrepresentation signals a lack of equal opportunities rather than differences in ability or interests.
• Addressing Innovation Gaps: Inventors often innovate in areas that reflect their experiences and interests, Women’s patents are more likely to focus on women’s needs. Therefore, women’s underrepresentation among inventors leaves gaps in technologies addressing issues more relevant to women, highlighting the need for diverse perspectives in innovation (Koning et al. 2021).

Women’s underrepresentation in innovation is influenced by a cascade of obstacles, starting with subtle, unconscious biases and evolving into systemic and institutional barriers. Making people aware of the problem is the first step toward addressing it. However, even the way we measure women’s contributions to innovation can obscure the full picture. For example, we track women in patented inventions—not women inventors. Many women contribute to innovation without their names appearing on patents, leaving their contributions invisible in standard metrics.

Three main types of barriers explain women under-representation in the innovation ecosystem:

1. Entry barriers: A smaller percentage of women pursue STEM fields compared to men. However, this is only part of the explanation. The leaky pipeline phenomenon describes how women leave STEM careers at higher rates, creating a disconnect between the percentage of women studying STEM and the percentage who become inventors. Keeping ability constant, three main factors affect the probability of becoming an inventor: Socio-economic background, ethnicity and gender (Bell et al. 2019). What these three characteristics capture, is that the key determinant is exposure to innovation during childhood. This suggests that to understand entry barriers for women, we should look at why they are less exposed to inventions than men, even when they live in the same families, grow up in the same neighborhoods, or attend the same school.
   A study that tracks people from Denmark over time until they eventually become inventors, shows that the transmission of inventorship from parents to children increases a child’s probability of becoming an inventor—but this effect is far stronger for boys (Hoisl et al. 2022). Parents can increase the probability of a child’s becoming an inventor by acting as role models at different stages of their children’s education. However, the benefit of having a parent inventor seem to go exclusively to boys, mostly because of gendered expectations developed by parents about daughters’ and sons’ returns from inventorship
2. Recognition barriers: Women file fewer patents than men, but their patents are not of lower quality compared to those of men (Jensen et al. 2018). Everything else equal, including workplace and occupation type, women are less likely to have patents assigned to their names: applications by women are more likely to be rejected than those of men, and those rejections are less likely to be appealed by the applicant. Gender differences reduce or disappear for rare names’ inventors. In addition, women and men inventors face different returns to innovation, with a wage gap that ranges between 14 and 20 percent (Hoisl and Mariani 2016). Moreover, while immediate returns to patents are the same irrespective of gender, women experience lower long-term returns (Toivanen and Väänänen, 2012).
3. Exit barriers: Women exit innovation-related professions at higher rates, often due to fewer career opportunities and lower pay (Preston, 1994; Hunt, 2016). Their career lengths are systematically shorter, and when women leave, they tend to enter lower-paying jobs or non-inventive occupations compared to men (Pudas, 2024). Our current understanding of women’s exit from innovation is limited. This topic is therefore the one that needs more urgent attention and analysis.

Efforts to close the gender gap in innovation must go beyond simple statistics. Research must explore the mechanisms driving disparities—why women are less likely to be exposed to innovation, why they face barriers to patent recognition, and why they exit at higher rates. Experiments and theoretical frameworks can help unpack these biases and develop targeted interventions.

Data integration is another critical step. Future research should go beyond analyzing women’s participation. It needs to address the mechanisms of selection in and out from inventorship, including selection into being listed in a patent, and their drivers. This would require collecting detailed data from different (and merged) sources of information —such as data from the national statistical offices, school records, employment histories, and patents— to reveal mechanisms driving people’s decisions and selection patterns.

The underrepresentation of women in innovation is not inevitable—it reflects systemic barriers that can be addressed. By uncovering and tackling the mechanisms behind gender disparities, we can create an innovation ecosystem where participation is driven by choice, not constrained by bias.

If you would like to read more about the research mentioned in her keynotes, you can find the references below: