The European Patent Office (EPO) publishes this Tuesday the very first study devoted to the gap between the sexes in France and in Europe in terms of innovation.
Only 16.6% of patent applications in France were filed by women between 2010 and 2019, and the proportion is also low on a European scale, reveals a study by the European Patent Office (EPO) published on Tuesday .
Like Europe, where this share stands at 13.2%, France is still far from achieving gender parity in terms of innovation, even if this rate has increased by 2 .6 points compared to the 2000-2009 period. In France, female inventors are largely from the chemical sector, which includes pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies in particular and accounts for 29% of patent applications.
“There is a lack of women in the hard sciences such as mathematics, physics, computer science… Even though this is where there are the most inventions!”analyzes Claude Grison, winner of the European Inventor Prize 2022, an award given each year by the EPO. “And women don’t necessarily occupy positions of major responsibility, don’t have a natural temperament to impose themselves, live in socio-cultural norms that don’t really give them confidence… Adding all that up, yes , it is difficult today to be a woman and to innovate»she told AFP.
Women better represented in public research
According to the EPO, France ranks 13th in the European ranking for its share of female inventors, far behind Latvia (30.6%), Portugal (26.8%) and Croatia (25.8%). , while Germany (10%) and Austria (8%) lag behind. “In the Baltic countries, Portugal or Spain, there are more patent applications coming from universities and public research. So mechanically it also increases the share of women among inventors”points out Yann Ménière, chief economist of the EPO, since according to him women are better represented in public research.
This study, the first carried out by the EPO on this subject, is above all a means of “raise questions” given the results obtained, according to him, to dig in the future “interesting leads” on probable causes and sometimes «complexes» of these gender disparities.