Indian Patent Office Incentivizes Women Applicants In Its Draft Rules 2018

WIPO, in its report¹ "World Intellectual Property Day 2018 Celebrates Women's Accomplishments: New WIPO Figures Show Highest-Ever Rate of Women Inventors, but Gender Gap Persists" presented on April 26, 2018, in Geneva, gave a picture of status of women in patenting in the year 2017. According to the report, although the status of women as patent applicants (Nationally or Internationally) has improved a lot in some countries like Republic of Korea and China where almost every second application comes with women as sole/one of the inventors, still most other countries need to go a long way to achieve the same. An excerpt from the report is shown in the table given below which gives country wise proportion (%) of women who are active as inventors in different countries.