Gender in the creation of intellectual property of the selected European Union countries

Abstract

The growing importance of gender studies in many disciplines is recently presented in the literature. However, there is no research on gender as the extraordinary source of innovation development. Specifically, patent activity is among the important elements determining the involvement of men and women in the innovation process. The article presents the results of studies focused on the patent inventors’ role, both women and men, in development activities of entities belonging to the business enterprise sector. The research objectives were: 1) to capture the statistical picture of inventive activity taking gender into account, and 2) to identify the directions and dynamics of change with regard to the proportion of inventors in the EU member states. The main results shows the increasing role of women rather than man as the inventors of patents in the business enterprise sector of the leading EU countries in a long term.