Measuring and Closing Innovation Gender Gaps: New Evidence from WIPO’s Third Research and Policy Experts Meeting, in Torino

Last September, WIPO organized the third edition of the WIPO Global Research Experts Meeting (GREM) on intellectual property (IP), innovation and gender within the framework of the 21st annual conference of the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Association at the Politecnico di Torino.

The GREM is a forum that connects academics and policy experts working on topics related to women participation in innovation, intellectual property and creative industries to encourage research on women's participation in innovation and creativity. Evidence on the subject remains scattered across disciplines, countries and data sources. By convening a dedicated meeting inside a major academic conference, we aim to give this work visibility among economists and IP scholars, to connect it with the needs of policymakers, and to build a lasting global network of experts who can compare methods and findings across regions.

Where do GREM participants come from? And which innovation ecosystems do they study?

During the previous editions of the conference (1st edition; 2nd edition) three main takeaways were highlighted: 1) the gender gap in innovation is wide, 2) it is closing slowly, and 3) better data is essential to understanding it. The 3rd edition took those points further. The ten studies presented tackled these issues from different angles: using patents and trademarks, employment and firm records, and interviews with innovators and officials across four continents. Taken together, they traced a line from how the gap is measured, through the careers and workplaces where it forms, to the policies meant to close it.

How do we measure women’s participation?

A recurring theme was that the size of the gap depends heavily on how it is measured. Inventor gender is usually inferred by matching first names against dictionaries, and a substantial share of names cannot be matched at all, particularly in East Asia and among names that travel across languages and cultures. Work presented in Turin showed that this failure is not random: a pipeline combining dictionaries with image retrieval and vision-language tools recovered inventors who were more likely to be women than those the dictionary classified confidently. Standard approaches may therefore understate women's presence in fields such as artificial intelligence.

The choice of IP right matters just as much. Evidence based on the WIPO Global Brands Database indicates that trademarks capture innovative and entrepreneurial activity in the smaller, younger and more service-oriented firms where women are better represented, and which patent data largely misses. Women's share of individual trademark applicants has almost doubled since 2000, though it remains below 40 per cent, roughly twice the share observed among inventors. A complementary study followed a cohort of Chilean trademark applications over ten years and found women and men equally likely to complete and renew their filings, with women marginally more likely to register successfully. The gap lay in whether and what women filed, not in how they fared once inside the system.

How do professional environments shape women’s participation?

If participation is the issue, much of the explanation sits in careers and workplaces rather than in IP offices. One study used a federal push to expand childcare for the under-threes across German regions and found that where coverage grew more, the sharp and persistent decline in inventive output following motherhood was markedly smaller, with benefits lasting well beyond the childcare years.

Peers and workplace composition emerged as equally important. Evidence from United States patent data shows that experienced women inventors move less often and that juniors who work with them achieve larger and more durable skill gains, a pattern then formalized in a model of knowledge diffusion and growth. Another contribution linked local employment of women in science and technology occupations to inventions addressing women's needs in medical technology, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods, finding more such patents in those regions, including from all-male inventor teams. Firm-level evidence from Japan added a caution: promoting women to boardrooms showed no association with patenting on its own, and a negative one where research staff were overwhelmingly male. Only where women were present in both the boardroom and the laboratory did the relationship turn positive.

How does policy support women’s participation?

Three countries’ studies examined the policy side. Spain stands out internationally, and the explanation points to the weight of its public research system, its specialization in chemistry-related fields and the increasingly collaborative nature of research. A comparison of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico highlighted the higher participation of women in the region, above the global average. Kenya illustrated the limits of good intentions: gender inclusion is written into national innovation policy, but women remain under a fifth of inventors, held back by weak implementation and coordination, limited outreach, administrative complexity and absent monitoring.

Takeaways from the third edition

Three messages ran through the meeting. First, measurement is not a technical footnote: how we identify innovators, and which IP rights we look at, changes the size of the gap we report, and the groups policy tries to reach. Second, the factors that matter often sit outside the IP system, in childcare, education, mentoring, and firm practices. Third, written commitments are not enough without institutional capacity and disaggregated data to follow through.

These sessions were a great opportunity to discover researchers and their work. If you would like to know more about them and their research, you can access the information below.

Additional resources

• Discover this year’s GREM presenters and their research
• Find out more about EPIP 2026
• WIPO’s literature repository on women’s participation