When the European Patent Office's (EPO) study "Women's participation in inventive ac-tivity" was published in November last year with the headline "New study: Fewer than 1 in 7 inventors in Europe are women", it was hardly surprising that Austria was not among the top performers in terms of female inven-tors, as Europe lags behind other continents in terms of the female participation rate in in-ventions. What was surprising, however, was that Austria is ranking in last place, with just one woman among 12 inventors.

The study by the European Patent Office shows that in 2019, across all 38 contracting states of the European Patent Convention (EPC), on average only 13.2% of inventors in Europe are women. The data shows that alt-hough the proportion of female inventors in Europe has increased in recent decades (in the late 1970s it was only 2%), there is still a large gender gap. With a rate of 8.2% (2019), Austria is in last place among the countries surveyed.

A look at the national patent application data also confirmed this performance: at around 6%, the proportion of applications by women at the Austrian Patent Office is even slightly lower than the figure for European applications from Austria.