Low participation by women in patenting novel technologies could hinder the government's innovation goals, the campaign group Women into Science and Engineering has said.
Only an estimated 9 per cent of patents filed in the UK in 2016 were submitted by women, according to an analysis of 800,000 patent applications filed to the Intellectual Property Office that year. The percentage, which compares with 30 per cent worldwide, is "shockingly low", said Helen Wollaston, chief executive of Wise, the campaign group for gender balance in science and engineering that commissioned the study.
“As it stands, it doesn’t bode very well for the government’s ambition to make the UK the most innovative economy in the world that we are so far behind other countries,” Wollaston said on 9 May.
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