This indicator is the ratio between the number of inventions produced by women (women inventorships) over the corresponding number of men (men inventorships), or equivalently, the ratio of the proportion of women inventorships (in total inventorships) over the corresponding proportion for men, during the four-year period ending in the reference year shown (e.g., the period represented by refeence year 2018 is the four-year period 2005-2018). The absolute number of inventorships used in computing this indicator is based on fractionalised counts of patent applications between their corresponding inventors: for example, if a patent application involves 10 inventors, each inventor is attributed an equal fraction of the inventorship (i.e. 1/10 of the invention). A score above 1 indicates that women in a given country produced a larger share of the country’s inventions than men, whereas a score below 1 means the opposite.
The data is collected from the 2021 She Figures publication. This publication investigates the level of progress made towards gender equality in research & innovation (R&I) in Europe. It is the main source of pan‑European, comparable statistics on the representation of women and men amongst PhD graduates, researchers and academic decision‑makers.
Data on patents in the She Figures publication are extracted from the European Patent Office (EPO) Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT), which covers patent data from over 150 offices worldwide. The required information for calculating the indicator is available in PATSTAT: inventor names with addresses and technology domain (sections of the International Patent Classification).
Available flags:
| b | break in time series | c | confidential |
| d | definition differs, see metadata | e | estimated |
| f | forecast | i | see metadata |
| m | imputed | n | not significant |
| p | provisional | r | revised |
| s | Eurostat estimate | u | low reliability |
| x | dropped due to insufficient sample size | y | unreliable due to small sample size |
| z | not applicable |