Women inventors: A growing and diverse contribution

International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8, is just around the corner. It’s a time to celebrate the numerous contributions of women—including their inventions and innovations.

A recently released analysis from Statistics Canada, using data on patent applications from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) and linked to the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database, indicates an uptick in women inventors.

A further breakdown of the numbers also gives us some insight into the diversity among women inventors. Here is a look at the highlights.

Majority of inventors are men, but women inventors growing at a faster pace than men inventors

Men inventors accounted for nearly 90% of inventors in each of these three periods: 2005 to 2009, 2010 to 2014 and 2015 to 2019. However, women inventors grew at a rate 14.3 percentage points higher than men from 2005 to 2009 and from 2015 to 2019.

Other research conducted by CIPO found that the number of women named on international Patent Cooperation Treaty applications grew by 377% from 1997 to 2015, compared with 285% for men.

Immigrant and younger women account for a large portion of women inventors

Immigrant women accounted for nearly half (44.3%) of women inventors in 2019, a 10.5 percentage-point increase from 2005. This may be due to university-educated immigrants (men and women) being twice as likely to be educated in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics field.

About three-quarters of women inventors were younger than 49 years in 2019, compared with less than two-thirds of men inventors.

Women inventors likelier to be owners of unincorporated businesses, and half of women are repeating inventors

On average, one in five women inventors (20%) from 2005 to 2019 were owners of unincorporated businesses. Over the same period, over 3 in 10 men inventors (30%) were owners of incorporated businesses.

On average, from 2001 to 2009, one in two women inventors (50%) were considered repeat inventors, meaning they had submitted a patent application in more than one year during that period. Among men, this proportion was nearly two-thirds (64.9%). However, a decline was observed among both groups from 2010 to 2019.

To learn more

The full report, “A Profile of Women Inventors in Canada,” is now available.

Check out our Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics Hub for more information and analysis on this topic.