WIPO Women Inventors Data: Country-by-Country Comparison
Global PCT inventor data for 2024. Why Türkiye and China lead. Why Japan and Germany lag. What name-based gender inference cannot tell us.
Women were 18.0% of all inventors named in PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) applications globally in 2024, up 0.2 percentage points from 2023 and up 6.4 points since 2010.
That's the headline WIPO number. The country-by-country picture is much more interesting: Türkiye leads the top 20 PCT origins at 26.0%, with China at 24.2%. Japan, Germany, and Austria sit around 10%. The US is in the middle. The spread says more about national institutional structure than about national talent pools.
This page walks the country data, explains what the rank order reflects, and notes the methodological limits of name-based gender inference (which is how every cross-country gender statistic in patenting is constructed).
This article presents published research data for educational purposes. It is not legal, policy, or investment advice. Patent gender statistics depend on name-based inference and methodology choices: see How we measure.
The global headline
WIPO's PCT Yearly Review 2025 (covering 2024 application data) reports the following:
| Metric | Value | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| Women's share of all PCT inventors (2024) | 18.0% | +0.2 pp from 2023 |
| Change since 2010 | +6.4 pp | From 11.6% to 18.0% |
| PCT applications with at least one woman inventor (2024) | ~36% | Up year over year |
Source: WIPO, PCT Yearly Review 2025 (executive summary).
Country-by-country: top 20 PCT origins, 2024
Women's share of inventors in PCT applications filed by residents of each origin country.
| Country | Women inventor share (2024) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Türkiye | 26.0% | Highest of top 20 |
| China | 24.2% | Heavily university- and SOE-weighted filings |
| Spain | ~23% | Largest Western European share |
| United States | ~17.8% | Northern America regional avg |
| United Kingdom | ~15-16% | UK IPO domestic figure ~12.7% |
| France | ~15% | Above EU average |
| Japan | ~10% | Persistent floor |
| Germany | ~10% | Industrial filer pool |
| Austria | ~10% | Lowest of top 20 |
Source: WIPO, PCT Yearly Review 2025. Some figures are inferred from regional aggregates where the per-country breakdown was not separately reported.
By region
| Region | Women inventor share (2024) |
|---|---|
| Latin America & Caribbean | 24.9% |
| Asia | 18.8% |
| Northern America | 17.8% |
| Oceania | 17.5% |
| Europe | 15.9% |
| Africa | 14.5% |
Source: WIPO, PCT Yearly Review 2025.
Latin America and the Caribbean leading is not a fluke: regional patent volume is smaller, but the share of women in the underlying research workforce is high (particularly in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile), and PCT filings from the region come disproportionately from universities and research institutes rather than industry.
Why Türkiye and China lead
Türkiye (26.0%)
Türkiye's high share reflects the gender composition of Turkish higher education in STEM, which is more balanced than most OECD averages, combined with the relatively recent surge in Turkish PCT filings (much of which comes from universities). When the filer pool is dominated by university research, the gender breakdown of the filer pool tracks the gender breakdown of the research workforce, not industry.
China (24.2%)
China's number has been climbing for two decades. Three structural factors drive it:
- University and state-owned enterprise filings dominate. Chinese universities held 25.3% of all valid Chinese invention patents by 2021, and SOEs filed heavily after WTO accession (2002). Both pools have more balanced gender ratios than private industry.
- National policy levers. Agrawal, Rathi, Chatterjee, and Higgins (NBER Working Paper 32547, 2024) found that post-WTO accession, Chinese patents with at least one female inventor rose 95% relative to comparison countries, and individual female inventors rose 111%. Gains were concentrated in less-complex AI rather than frontier AI.
- STEM education composition. Women's share of Chinese STEM tertiary enrollment has been higher than US peers for years.
Why Japan and Germany lag
Japan (~10%)
Japan's roughly 10% number has been persistent for over a decade. The structural explanation is upstream: Japan has the lowest researcher-pool gender share in the OECD at 15.3% women researchers (IMF analysis, 2023). The patent system cannot exceed the talent pool composition. Without major changes to women's representation in Japanese industrial R&D, the PCT number will not move.
Germany (~10%)
Germany's number reflects an industrial filer base. German PCT filings are dominated by large industrial firms (automotive, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, engineering), where women's representation in senior R&D and design roles has been growing slowly. EPO 2022 analysis put Europe-wide women inventor rates at 13.2%, with Germany specifically at 10.0%. Country-level laggards in Europe include Austria (8.0%) and Liechtenstein (9.6%).
The European outlier list
EPO 2022 analysis also identified the European leaders: Latvia (30.6%), Portugal (26.8%), Croatia (25.8%), Spain (23.2%), Lithuania (21.4%). The pattern is partly small-denominator volatility (small filing counts produce larger percentage swings) and partly real structural difference: these countries have more gender-balanced research workforces and higher proportions of university-led filings.
EPO 2026: "Promoting women in STEM"
The European Patent Office published Promoting women in STEM on March 3, 2026, through its Observatory on Patents and Technology. The report's headline findings:
- 13.8% women inventors in Europe in 2022, up from 13.0% in 2019 (a +0.8 percentage point improvement over three years).
- Fewer than 1 in 10 European startup patent applications include a female founder.
- The report concludes that women's research has comparable inventive potential to men's: the explanation for under-representation is social, institutional, and economic, not a difference in inventive output.
The "comparable inventive potential" finding aligns with the Yang et al. (PNAS, 2022) and Subramani & Saksena (Nature Biotechnology, 2025) findings discussed in One woman is not parity: where women patent, they produce work of equal or higher novelty and disruption, but receive less downstream recognition.
Deep-tech and the European startup picture
A separate EPO Observatory study (also March 2026) tracked European deep-tech startups holding European patents and found that only 13.5% have at least one female founder. Country-level data ranged from Spain (19.2%, leader) to the Netherlands (5.5%, laggard).
Deep-tech startup founder data is downstream of both the inventor gender gap (covered across this series) and the VC funding gender gap (a separate but compounding phenomenon). The combined effect is that the most consequential European technology companies of the late 2020s are being founded with even lower women's representation than the average European patent filing.
UK IPO 2026: prosecution attrition by team type
The UK Intellectual Property Office published Female Participation in Inventorship (Brady Bowes) on March 5, 2026, with the most recent UK-specific data and a sharper analytical angle than headline inventor-rate statistics: team composition predicts prosecution outcomes.
2024 inventor occurrence
- 7.8% female inventor occurrence at the 95% confidence threshold (N = 1,089).
- 10.9% at the all-matches threshold (N = 3,385).
- The range reflects how strict the name-gender inference is; both numbers describe the same UK patent population in 2024.
Application termination before grant, by team type
| Team type | Termination rate before grant |
|---|---|
| Individual female inventor | 48.3% |
| All-female inventor teams | 42.1% |
| All-male inventor teams | 29.7% |
Source: UK IPO, Female Participation in Inventorship (March 2026), Brady Bowes.
The UK IPO finding is the cleanest evidence in any national patent dataset that the prosecution funnel widens the gender gap independently of the filing gap. Individual female applicants in the UK are 1.6 times more likely to terminate their application before grant than all-male teams, even after the application has been filed and entered the prosecution pipeline. See Where women's patents disappear for the cross-jurisdictional version of the same dynamic.
UK historical baseline
- 1998: 6.8% of UK patent inventors were women.
- 2017: 12.7% of UK patent inventors were women.
- University vs industry split (2017): 20% in universities, 10% in industry.
Methodology note
Every country-level gender statistic on this page (USPTO, WIPO, EPO, UK IPO) is constructed by inferring inventor gender from given names. Accuracy varies significantly across naming traditions and is lower for East Asian names than European names. Non-binary and pseudonymous inventors are invisible to these methods. Read the full methodology note on the hub: How we measure.
These limits mean that international comparisons should always be read with measurement-error bars. The Türkiye 26.0% and China 24.2% headline numbers are real, but the true confidence intervals on each are wider than the headline suggests.