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 this Tuesday. Like Europe, where this share stands at 13.2%, France is still far from reaching gender parity in terms of innovation, although this rate has increased by 2.6 points compared to the period 2000-2009.
In France, female inventors are largely from the chemical sector, which includes pharmaceuticals and biotech 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… Whereas this is where there are more inventions!” Analyzes Claude Grison, winner of the Prix de the European Inventor 2022, an award given every year by the EPO.
“And women don’t necessarily hold positions of greater responsibility, they don’t have a natural temperament to assert themselves, they live in socio-cultural norms that don’t really give them confidence… If you add it all up, yes.” today it is difficult to be a woman and to innovate,” she told AFP.
13 place
According to the EPO, France is ranked 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%). %) lagged.
“In the Baltic countries, Portugal or Spain, there are more patent applications from universities and public research. So mechanically this also increases the proportion of women among inventors”, says Yann Ménière, chief economist at 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 “raising questions” in view of the results obtained, according to him, to investigate in the future “interesting clues” about the probable causes and sometimes “complex” of these gender disparities.
Source: BFM TV
