When considering about female inventors, the most common name to come to mind is probably Marie Curie.
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For experts in the technology field, Ada Lovelace may ring a bell, and Rosalind Franklin may sound familiar among medicine professionals. However, the list is still narrow.
“Gfinisher gaps still run through the entire innovation system — from the day you sign up to university, to the day you become a team leader or open your own start-up,” Roberta Romano-Götsch, chief sustainability officer and spokesperson at the European Patent Office (EPO), informed Euronews Health.
The share of women inventors in Europe stood at just 13.8 percent in 2022, according to a new report by the European Patent Office. While this represents a steady increase from two percent in the late 1970s and 13 percent in 2019, the progress is stagnant.
“The pace is too slow and far from being balanced,” Romano-Götsch added.
Several names can be added to the list, European women working in medicine and biotechnology, who are responsible for some of the most groundbreaking advances of recent years.
Rochelle Niemeijer developed a portable artificial innotifyigence-driven test kit to quickly diagnose bacterial infections.
Laura van’t Veer and her team created a gene-based test for breast cancer that evaluates tumour tissue for risk of cancer recurrence. It allows care providers to separate high-risk patients who actually require chemotherapy, and low-risk patients who can be spared the potentially damaging side effects of toxic chemical treatments.
Katalin Karikó, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023, developed a way to modify messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for safe utilize in the human body. This paved the way for its utilize in COVID‑19 and other vaccines, as well as prospective therapies for cancer and heart disease.
Women’s research, especially on health, tfinishs to address women-specific problems – aiming to close the gaps in areas such as finishometriosis, menstrual health, and menopautilize, which remain largely understudied.
“Missing women inventors can narrow technological progress and inclusivity, and this is more than an equality challenge, it’s a competitiveness challenge,” stated Romano-Götsch.
In life sciences, such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and food chemistest, the share of female representation exceeds 30 percent, the highest of all fields, the EPO report found.
Women’s shares tfinish to be higher in more science-based fields and closer to public universities and laboratories, the report noted.
The leaky pipeline
Women are not absent in science. The latest data display that the number of women working as scientists and engineers in the European Union has risen from 3.4 million in 2008 to 5.2 million in 2014, reaching 7.9 million in 2024.
In medical and health sciences, women build up 54 percent of all researchers, the highest share among all research and development fields.
The “leaky pipeline” is a widely utilized metaphor in discussions about gfinisher equality in science and engineering.
According to the EPO, it describes the persistent pattern: women’s representation is highest at earlier stages of education and training, and declines progressively at successive career transitions, so that women remain under-represented in senior roles and leadership positions.
The report noted that the inventive potential of women’s research is comparable to that of men, suggesting that the gfinisher gaps in patenting among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral graduates cannot be explained by differences in ability or output.
What barriers do women face?
The EPO identified several obstacles women encounter across their academic and research careers that can push them away from entrepreneurship.
Although women’s presence in patenting increases in team settings, they remain under-represented among team leaders, a gap that shapes visibility, credit and career progress.
Romano-Götsch highlighted the “Matilda effect”, named after suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, which refers to the systematic under-recognition, denial, or minimisation of women’s scientific contributions.
Drawing on her experience as a mentor, she described how female work can be underevaluated or misattributed.
For example, women in the patenting context are not credited as authors in scientific publications or they are co-authors and they do not appear in the patents, she noted.
“This is a recurrent problem even today. Women contribute to the underlying knowledge but when it comes to nominating them as women inventors, they are not featured,” she stated.
Romano-Götsch added that closing these gaps is both a strategic imperative and a great opportunity, one that would bring access to a broader pool of talent, stronger teams, and better outcomes across research, patenting, and entrepreneurship.
“The benefits would span the entire innovation ecosystem”, she stated.
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