 Welcome to this session this panel discussion on women innovation and intellectual property. We're delighted to be hosting this is the third year in a row at the assemblies that we have had an issue a panel discussion on women and one aspect or another of intellectual property. It's of course an extraordinary important topic because we see that innovation now is the flavor of the month all around the world and everyone is talking about innovation all the time but not so much talk about women innovation and all of the statistical evidence indicates that we have really a great deal of progress to make. Some progress has been made as my colleague Bruno Lefebvre will indicate in our statistical studies but a huge amount of progress still needs to be made. I have pleasure in welcoming well Samas Shamun my colleague who's the head of our media and news and media section will be moderating. You will introduce the speakers with you but let me just briefly I'll leave Samas to introduce them but let me just thank each of the speakers for coming. We're really delighted to have you here and to have specialists who are addressing this. I thank also our diversity officer specialist Kaori Seto who's here and I would like to say that we have taken this issue extremely seriously at WIPO both because of course it's a major part of the Sustainable Development Goals. It's a system-wide commitment in the United Nations but we also have a number of specific activities and programs ourselves which range from the introduction of a policy on gender equality in 2014 through to a network of 25 gender focal points within the organization. Of course we participate in the system-wide activities on gender equality. We've done a lot of work as I mentioned Bruno will indicate in to try to get a better empirical basis of what actually is happening and we do that through our World Intellectual Property Indicators. It's a feature of our PCT annual or yearly review. It's now an indicator that's included in our Global Innovation Index also and we have quite a number of programs that promote the empowerment of women in intellectual property. So we very much focused on this issue as an organization and in our programs. We're delighted to have this panel discussion today. I apologize and ask for your indulgence. I have to leave for another engagement. Unfortunately you have these conflicting engagements at the time of the of the assemblies but it's nice to at least be here at the opening and to wish you a very interesting discussion which I regret that I shall not be able to hear. Thank you very much and I'll hand over to Samar who is going to moderate for us. Thank you. So we are we are joined here by a very distinguished panel of speakers and though distinguished is a somewhat overused word in the world of diplomacy I actually really mean it. This is as I said distinguished panelists hailing from different backgrounds but all with a single passion and that for innovation and the audience as well is equally distinguished. This is not a theoretical discussion. We have here a very interesting mix of brainpower and willpower to really bring about change in the field of intellectual property in particular and hopefully in the wider landscape of innovation. I hope we'll all leave this meeting with a better understanding of what can be done to ensure that everybody everyone women men alike can benefit equally in the innovation game. Very quickly I'd like to introduce our speakers today on my right is Ines Knapper from Germany. She lives close by so she's a resident in neighboring France. She describes herself as an innovation enthusiast and social entrepreneur. Her goal is to make the world a better place and she's actually putting her money where her mouth is and trying to do just that through innovation by bringing like-minded people together to solve and address issues in the humanitarian world. She'll tell us about hackathons that she organizes and we've been privileged to have a conversation before and it's quite exciting. Daniela Galindo from Columbia she's flown over from Columbia and she is a living example how necessity is the mother of invention. Daniela is a recipient of multiple awards for an innovation that helps people with disabilities communicate better and she'll give us a small demo and I think you'll be very excited to see what she has to say on the question of innovation. Helen Lee I would say is a citizen of the world originally from China. She's now a researcher at the University of Cambridge leading the diagnostics development unit and she is a prolific user of the patent system. She joined academia following a highly successful career in the private sector notably at Abbott Labs but also at the French National Blood Transfusion Center in Paris. We'll be hearing about her work including her groundbreaking invention for a diagnostic test for a range of different infectious diseases. Bruno Lefebvre our own Bruno is a statistical analyst and one of our own gender champions at Waipo and he'll walk us through some key data on work that Waipo has done in the field. Now I would like to stop talking and give the floor to our panelists and first of all ask them why they accepted our invitation to be part of this panel today. Daniela? Well, hi everyone. I'm very excited to be here. It's my first time in Genoa. It's my first time in Switzerland and I really appreciate this invitation. I accepted this invitation because well me as an entrepreneur I feel passionate about talking what I'm doing every day that is stopping stereotypes and this is one of the one of that stopping stereotype. So I would like to during this discussion to like to tell you about my personal opinion about this stereotype and my personal experience. Thanks Samar for the introduction and thanks for having me here today. I understood this is a very special moment for you as well with the assembly here. I can tell you it's also a very important moment in the year for myself because tomorrow we will kick off with our humanitarian hackathon that we are organizing now for the fourth time at CERN. The port is an association which is based in Switzerland. It's non-for-profit. We are related to CERN because many of our members are working with CERN and are volunteering their free time and their brain power to this association to help bridging the gap between the humanitarian world on one side and the innovation technology innovators on the other side. And our event basically starts tomorrow and this is why my dress code is a bit unconventional but I also tell you for innovation you do not need a tie. So we try to be at a bit bottom up. Why I accepted to be here today because I think diversity is an important topic and okay sorry but I see that the balance is just one facet of it. So what we do with our humanitarian hackathons we are not shaping only the challenges very thoroughly that we are asking the participants to work on but we are also selecting our participants. So there is a huge range of hackathons and I don't know if you heard this word ever before. It comes from hacking so basically making things simpler and marathon where you have you are going over a long distance and you are having a trouble to reach your destination in time and quickly. So this is a bit of what we are doing and there are a huge facet of those some innovation events where you basically come to an event you pitch your idea you find like-minded people that are interested in your idea and help you over 24 hours to code something or to build something. But what we do with our association is we are trying to be on the other side of the scale. So we are running a curated hackathon where we have basically we are as I said we are shaping the challenges together with the humanitarian challenge setters be it international organizations or individuals and then on top of those challenges we see who can best benefit to this project and can maybe add value to the outcome of the project and this is why diversity is very important and gender balance is one focus and one facet. But I agree that it is very important in innovation as such and I appreciate that we are focusing today on the gender but I just would like to to make sure that we also recall that the other flavors of diversity are equally important to have a sustainable innovation. Thank you. Thank you. Why am I here? I was curious. It's really by curiosity because when I was invited I said to my husband as I bet you the number for women inventors going to be dismal. He said why don't you look at what happens with the Nobel Prize. I think that's a good idea. He said that bet you it is bad maybe better than the Nobel Prize. So we looked at the Nobel Prize and in physics man women 99 to 1. Medicine 94% to 5%. Chemistry 97% men 2% women. Literature is a little bit better. 87 men 12% women. Peace is the best. 87 85% men 15% women. For reasons I don't understand economics is terrible. Only one woman ever won the economic. And yet you have Christine Lagarde and you have Janet Yellen. I don't understand why only one woman won this economic prize. And then I looked at you know this mathematics prize. It's a field prize. It is every four years. Almost no women. Then I thought well let me look at you know you read the time magazine and each year they have a person a used to be man of the year. Then they change the person of the year. So I looked at how many men how many women. So let me tell you so it's for men to women is it's almost 20 to 1. But what is really disappointing is that of the few women who were there they're either by birth or by marriage. You do not sell Amelia Earhart on the thing. You do not see Marie Curie there. And so I thought to myself let me see how in the pattern world it reflects or not reflect what happens in the general society. And so I hope along the way today I don't know anything about your organization. I don't know about you. And I want to know what you really think what we can do to make it better because I'm quite sure we need to make it better. Perfect. Thank you. Before I hand over the floor to Bruno to face to frame the discussion in data I want to turn to the audience and ask just a couple of you out here. What are you guys expecting from this panel discussion. Is everybody going to be shy. Am I going to have to pick on somebody. Please. Can you introduce yourself. Mahabakhit from the League of Arab State Director of Intellectual Property Department in Cairo. I believe first of all I would like to thank Waibu very much for organizing this panel discussion. I expect that because we are all of us sharing the same goal that to support women innovation and inventions and to have more numbers of women in the field of science. As the professor now told us about Nobel Prize there is no much number of women. So I expect from this panel that even to have awareness and support for women invention and innovation and also to work together with Waibu and with our government for the policy. Because if we do not put a policy from the state or from government for supporting women and we have more women in the field, empowering women in the field of innovation and inventions, we cannot create new generation of women that can make life better. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Dominique Norerts. I work here in Waibu in Human Resources and I'm quite curious to hear about what's happening in innovation because we're about to launch an innovative program and piloting it with another 11 UN entities on emerging women leaders. So I'm hoping that the discussion here will actually contribute some interesting elements to our program as well. Okay, we'll come back to the audience in a few minutes. Perhaps now Bruno can follow up from what Helen was telling us about statistics. I can offer my own layperson's interpretation of economics. I can't balance my bank account but we'll hand over to Bruno to give us the real insights based on data. Okay, so yes, certainly the woman inequity is less critical in the patent world than for the normal price. That's what we could identify. Since last year Waipo produces statistics on the women participation in international patenting. In order to be able to produce these statistics, the Economic and Statistics Division has created a worldwide gender named dictionary that now contains more than 6 million names for 182 countries. Thanks to this dictionary we could attribute the gender for 96% of all inventors named in PCT international applications. And I will now present you the main result that we could see from this new data set. Less than one-third of all PCT applications filed in 2016 included at least a woman inventor. It was precisely 30%. So said differently there are 70% of PCT applications filed that list only men inventors. So this is to show you how the gender gap is nowadays. But the encouraging news that we could find from data is that when comparing the 2016 figures with the one 10 years earlier in 2007, we could see that the number of PCT applications with women inventors has nearly doubled over that period of time. And also in terms of share, the share of 2007 was of only 23% against 30% in 2016. So this is an increase of 7 percentage points over 10 years, which is I would say a relatively high growth. A large proportion of this growth is on the account of applicants in China and in the Republic of Korea. Half of applications filed by applicants from these two countries lists at least a woman inventor. This is far above the 30% the world average. And you certainly know also that applicants from these two countries have also sharply increased their use of the PCT system over the past 10 years. But beside of that, a very interesting founding also was that in each of the six regions in the world, we saw an increase in share of PCT applications with women inventors over the past decade. Meaning that it's in every region of the world that we saw the share increasing. This is a very encouraging message, I think. So to conclude and to summarize, I will say that the trends are going toward more gender equality. But we're still far from gender balance. What I mean by gender balance is having a similar number of men inventor and women inventor listed in PCT applications. We were curious when we found these results to see when we would achieve gender balance. So we thought, well, let's try to extrapolate the trend, assuming that it will keep the same pace. And we found that we will achieve gender balance just in 60 years in 2076. Just to show you how far we are from there. Thank you. Thank you Bruno. We see the statistics are there. Women are patenting less than men from our data in the international patent system. Patents we know, though, are one indicator of inovative activity. What does this all mean for you? If I can ask our panelists, what does this mean? And perhaps if you can help us draw wider conclusions as to what this means about women in innovation. Oh, thank you. So Helen, would you like to start? I personally find the patent process actually gender neutral, gender indifferent. I never felt any difference in the way I applied in the way it was judged. I think if it is one place where gender did not make a difference, in the award of patents, it is in the awards, it is in the patent. It is clear that the number is pretty dismal. And you mentioned 60 years, which is really startling. I used to work at a pharmaceutical company and what the management always said, I don't care what happens after three years, either I'm fired or I'm promoted. So 60 years is a long time to be fired and to be promoted. So I think what really happens is that this really reflects in general the society, the role women play and where they are in terms of the hierarchy. So I think the problem is upstream and not at the level of the PCT. Okay, can you perhaps, Daniela, what has been your experience with innovation and intellectual property? Well, I think every event that I have been in, I'm the only woman in the event have been nominated for different awards in different countries, as MIT, as Royal Hague and the only woman in this event. So I agree with you that I don't feel different about innovation by being a woman. But at the same time, I'm the only woman around. Actually here I came to Geneva because I'm one of the finalists in the event of the Impact Hub in the Accelerate 2030 and I'm the only woman chosen in this event. So it reflects the reality, the role that men has taken for many years, that they are the creators, they are the inventors and well, women are increasing in this role, but we are far away from the balance that we are looking for. If I can just say with you for a second, you've succeeded as an innovator now as being obviously being a woman to not hinder your success as an innovator. What can your experience bring to a possible solution to rectify this imbalance? Well, I think was the education I received in my family. My mom is like my mom and my dad educated me without stereotypes, without the blue and pink stereotype. I remember when I was a child, I received puzzles, soccer balls, cars, dolls, and I played with everything. And so I generate some skills, like the competitive skills, the cerebral skills, the skill to have relations with everyone. So I think that gave me the confidence to be part of everything without being like, oh, I'm a girl, I'm not going to make business because there are a lot of women, like I see with many women. And that, I think that's the point of what I'm right now. Thanks to my dad, thanks to my mom, I'm right now what I am. Yeah, I would like also to point out what Daniela already said is that sometimes I have the impression that especially IP rights is received in the female world as very aggressive and competitive. And I must say for myself, at least, I'm really tired of always this competition that a female has to be as good as a man, or we have to more show that we are as good or even better. And this is something that is really tiring me. And there I think that IP rights is one form of, or patents is one form of IP, but maybe we take more the scientific papers to show that. So we have a lot of female participants at CERN, also in our hackathons, who release papers, scientific papers, because the goal is the same in a sense. We want to secure the IP, but we also would like to take the advantage of sharing our knowledge and make it open to the general public. And I think this is something that we can learn on this, what we especially see at CERN, that there is in the local communities and cultures, and you do not need to travel far, let's say Italy, there are a lot of more female physicists in Italy than there is in Germany, for example. And the number of scientific papers written by female physicists from Italy is much higher than from Germany. So what can we learn from that is that maybe we should try to break down the burden and make the word patent not so aggressive and competitive, but try to find new ways of patenting or protecting our IP, but not having this kind of aggressive or competitive tone, on the other hand. I actually think it should be competitive, and it should be held at a high level. And I think women have every ability to compete with men. We're not really talking about whether men and women in a given patent can do it or not. We're really talking about the percentage of women and men in getting patents. I'm looking at this chart. Well, in a way, you see in Africa is 21%. In Asia is 32%. And I work in Africa a lot, and I must say women in Africa have a very hard time. And in a way, that statistics reflect not just the percentage in the workplace, but also the general culture. And I like to tell people that, you know, in this women's liberal thing, you have a name called Ms. The language tells you a lot of things about how they perceive men and women. In Chinese language, there is a way to call Ms. There is a way to call Mrs. There's another way to call lady. And it doesn't refer necessarily to your marital status. So I go back to what I said before, I think women can compete on any level. It's a number game. And we just don't have enough number to go through the educational level. And we don't have enough number in the high echelons to be able to benefit from the pattern is just a reflection of the more generic phenomena. If I can just go back to there is one study that we've seen that shows that what you're saying about scientific papers that women who are listed as authors in scientific papers tend not to appear as much in the patent application. So let me provoke a question. Are you saying that the intellectual property system should not be a measure of are we looking at the issue in an incorrect or biased way that there are women in innovation because we have all of these statistics showing that women are publishing scientific papers. So what should be how do we measure women in innovation? We've tried to do it through the patent system. Do you have any thoughts on that perhaps? I think it's about the recognition that drives women especially. And this is I think the difference between the just patenting and the scientific paper. So I don't say that patents are wrong in itself, but maybe one needs to work on the perception and the framework of how the messages transmitted to make a change and having more female people who pattern. But then on the other hand maybe one could also look into more the new ways and technologies that have been designed like the blockchain and the smart contract where it's building more on trust and the principle of recognition and the possibility to share safely the knowledge without risking to lose the ground for business. So maybe you just picked one example like the patents to do the measure, but maybe it needs to be a bit wider to understand the full spectrum of women in innovation. Thank you. Thank you. Now the IP system intellectual property is obviously not just about patents. Now Daniella you have developed a product which I hope you will show us. Sure. Iness you have a company. I understand that it has not been, you have not used any of the intellectual property rights available like trademarking the name of your company for instance. Could you perhaps develop that a bit more and tell us why you have not used the tools of the IP system to help you develop your companies? Well I developed my company to develop a technological solution that is here for people with disabilities and people who are illiterate in order for them to communicate with anyone anywhere and this is how it works so if I can show you and you hear me we recognize, we all recognize the language in images like I'm here and I don't know how to talk in French and I was just trying to order a pizza and I couldn't so I can say by images for example. Hello my name is Juliana I want to eat brownie. So this is an example of how it works. I said my name is Juliana, my name is Daniella but it's my sister. This was created because of my sister, my sister was born with a disability so that's the reason we created this solution. We don't have, we have right now the copyrights of our software we don't have the trademarks and anything else. The reason why I think is lack of information lack of resources and I can say that in my country and from Columbia as they mentioned in my country there was a campaign from the government for patents and I applied and the answer was that I had anything to patent. So I think that we in our country had also lack of information to have the correct copyrights patterns and the IP we want and we have to. So with the hackathons that we are running is we are enabling people to come together to be innovative, to have the innovative juices flowing and to bring on the table the right set of skills and minds and ideas. And this is basically where our hackathon then ends with the presentation of the first working prototype. What we encourage our participants is to use as much open source as we can to transmit the importance of humanitarian innovation and then I use in this sense not maybe the classical IP system but more something which is broad and known in the scientific community like sharing what we have. But once the product are presented in the final presentation where you all have your invitation on your desks to come and join us on Sunday evening we encourage then our participants to take the ideas forward and we have a good track record of companies and associations that have been created after our hackathons where most of our team members are part of those associations that keep the IP rights. So there is this, we encourage our participants to have this open source but we are also encouraging on the other hand that entrepreneurs are taking their ideas forward and make something out of it. Can I ask you just, you describe the hackathons and how you work on humanitarian issues perhaps by giving a concrete example for instance the ICRC example that you guys helped develop these great bags so people can really understand what role you play in promoting innovation. So we started with our idea in 2014 and we were inspired by some friends who work for the Red Cross and have seen many, many difficult situations all around the globe and their idea was basically if we could think of any system how to make light and easy transportable fridge to cool vaccinations. So we said this is a great idea and we would like to work on this challenge and we accept this as a challenge. But when we then gathered the team around this challenge it came quite clear that the team looked into the different products that need cooling so which is food and drinks on one side, medication, vaccination on the others but then someone also said well basically after natural catastrophes or after wars you also have to chill that bodies until they have the possibility to identify who is this person who passed away. So there is this importance of also working on this part and one team said this is so important to our hearts because we can make a lot of influence on the people who lost their loved ones by preserving the bodies and making it more possible for the forensics to identify the person and return the body to the families that they accepted the challenge to see if one could innovate body bags. So the body bags itself it's the plastic bag who has not seen innovation since a couple of decades now and the idea was can modern technology be introduced to body bags to delay decomposition and therefore help the forensic specialist for identification and the team took it as forward as they could working together then after the hackathon with the Red Cross to speak to field experts, to speak to forensic experts they have been to conferences where forensic people meet to understand really what is the need in the field and they made an agreement with ICRC to produce a second and the third round of prototypes which they now have developed and delivered to the Red Cross and which are currently in field testing and they have also applied to get a fund from the humanitarian innovation fund and they got this grant successfully accepted. So this team after the hackathon they also said we have to work on this topic even though that we cannot commit full time on it and we do it next to our works and they set up an association to run this forward and some of our team members from the port are also part of this team of the body bags. Thank you. Helen can you share your experience with the IP system? I absolutely believe in the IP system. I worked very hard to actually interview different patent offices to find a lawyer that not only knows patent law but also biology and the machine because what we're doing and I'll tell you about it in a minute involves chemistry, electronics, mechanics and plastic design. Fundamentally what we try to do is to make the detection of infectious diseases so it's a genetic material in a very sensitive way and simple, robust and anyone can do that. So I think you probably know that the detection of nucleic acid is extremely complex and even in China today if you were looking for the nucleic acid of an infectious disease they have to have three rooms, one room two, do the sample prep, one room to do the amplification and a room to do the detection. And the centralized machine is the size of a mini car. And that reagent is so fragile that you have to ship it in dry ice which makes it totally impossible in Africa or in the lower level clinics. So what we try to do is to put together what I call the point of care system, we call it SAMBA because the engineer like dancing he called SAMBA so we force fitted the simple amplification base as a, we basically reduce a complex test into the size of a coffee machine with all the reagents available and you just plug it in and you cannot put it wrong because like a Lego stick you couldn't put it wrong and it is now being used in many African countries in lower level clinics. But I knew what the question was about I believed and I still believe in intellectual property and for a small company and academic unit we spend tremendous amount of money proportionately through not only file but maintain in different territories. Well there is one patent for which I actually invented the invention of the year two years ago. One of those patents that is so clear cut is not sophisticated nobody, it's nothing subtle about it. And a large company absolutely in fringe. Do we have the capacity to sue them? Zero. Because they will cost a couple of million the first thing they would do is go and invalidate our patent in this territory in that territory. So I actually think it is one thing to file a patent to have the freedom to operate that allows you to do what you want to do. It is quite another thing to protect it from infringement by people who are much stronger with much bigger money than you have and I know this is a meeting about women and I care deeply about that. But I also think unless we are able to protect the intellectual property and I actually was thinking if we don't do that we only have one side of the coin and I actually was thinking why I don't know you must be very important people if you are here why don't we put together a group the different institutions or government can put together a war chest of 100 million to 100 million doesn't matter and that there are other people like us in academia in small company who are unable to protect the IP to go and then it would have needed two, three, four million dollars which we absolutely did not have but to really to protect the IP but to do it in such a way that if they get licensed if they get royalty that money goes back to that funding stream. So it becomes self perpetuating one because otherwise we're really just talking about one side of the coin and so I really plead that I don't know who you are but that I think is a worthwhile thing for us to do but today we cannot protect ourselves and that company knows it, it blatantly violates it I look at it and there's nothing I can do Well that brings me to, leads me to my second question which you partly answered is one solution is how can we, what can we do to foster innovation ecosystems in which in particular women can flourish and Daniela you started talking about it that it starts with the family what else do you think can be done? For me it's like the relation the relation between government and family. Government, I am tired of seeing commercials or the social media like the woman is the responsible of caring about the kids and caring about the kitchen and caring about all the home things and the businessman is only the man actually when we were doing the database in Orlando con Julius we were looking for all the all the professions and you say businessman it's not common to say business woman so that's the point we are always looking for the same role the role of the men and the examples are always the men so I think that the government must do some campaigns where the role are both not only the women who take care of the kids are the women and the men or the parents whatever it is where the office is in charge of a woman or in charge of men it's not only one person it's not only one gender and if we have more good examples about women and about men we get that balance as a matter of fact that if parents see that by giving a soccer ball to a girl is okay more girls will have a soccer ball for example in my family we had a conversation a few months ago where my uncles and say that they won't ever give a soccer ball to a baby girl and it was like what like if I had a girl please the first give you are going to give to my daughter is a soccer ball because well I don't agree that because there are many skills that a soccer ball can give you and so we still believe in those stereotypes and if governments don't do like a social promotion about stopping the stereotypes in this like massive publications we won't see a change I mean it's true you never hear a man saying I wonder how I can manage my career and have a family at the same time but anyway Ines thoughts I do not really agree on this thing because I'm a mother of three my youngest is not yet one year old and the oldest is not yet six years old and when I returned first of all you're asked that at work at least here in Switzerland not if you come back to work but when which is I think as a woman very nice to see that you are treated equally as your colleague and then secondly is when I came back to work we did not have a child care solution for the little one because the infrastructure wasn't in place to take short term care so my husband took some time off and took care of my girl and he's working with a UN organization here as well and he had for example the pram with him in Palais des Nations having joining a Skype meeting on the phone while pushing the pram towards the Parc Prenier so I think we have to see that the role models are changing and the family models are changing and there I see a lack of adaptation to the real needs that are currently there because I mean we are comparing here to Switzerland which is already very good and child care there is a lot of crashes and kindergarten facilities but when you then take again the Swiss prices it's not affordable either I go work to pay my child care facilities or I stay at home to take care of my family and there I see a big change now in fostering the ecosystem to accommodate this needs and I don't think this is certainly a women's need but it's a family need and also something where the men can help to break this stereotype and the silo Helen your experience is quite unique on this panel in the sense that you've worked in the corporate sector, in the public sector, in academia can you share your thoughts on how you saw that women were perhaps encouraged to be innovators within the three different sectors? I'll share with you two experience one is when I was in Abbott this all of a sudden the government contract are asking that any company that can bid for the contract must show that the demographic of the company in different levels from low to high reflect men and women and reflect the minority the ratio composition so my boss had a number of business units and I was in charge of one business unit it's about 100 people it's one of the smaller business units so they did for the first time a kind of statistics to see how many men, how many women in different levels well it turns out my business unit reflected almost perfectly to the demography and my boss was really happy he said great Helen you're delivering this system to me how did you do it? I said Jay you have to tell me that the women is not as good as men and the minority not as good as the white men to explain my statistics I didn't do anything I honestly didn't do anything and so for this meeting I actually called my patent lawyer I said Neil we have about 15 patents quite a number of applicants so I said tell me how many are men and how many are women well it turns out 62% are women and I was startled he said this is quite unique I said well Neil I can't figure out why I certainly didn't do anything about it it isn't like I'm saying you're a woman let's do that we finally figure out that the reason is that I didn't just have the women at the lower level that does what the boss says do this so they're not the inventor because they're just executing but that in fact the women were there at different levels and they are just as capable of deciding what experiments to do and therefore naturally they are inventors so I go back to what I said earlier it is not about the perception of women there are plenty of fantastic women role models and I think the world is changing it is really the fact that women are not represented in equal proportion in higher levels and I think that probably is the most important thing if that can be the case then I think everything will reflect that quite naturally and so I don't know I think in the end you're going to ask what will the people do well maybe it's a survey and ask what the institution would do to make women available in the higher level which really means it's a big elephant in this room as people don't talk about that women have babies they have to have babies they need to go off the working trail and they it's very difficult to bring up children and even though many men are more willing nevertheless it is by nature and by design women want to be with the babies so during this period of a few years it's really very difficult for them to maintain in the career path I think what I did and don't think I'm a women's liberal I'm not sometimes when somebody is pregnant again I say oh no not again I can say that quite jokingly because it's very inconvenient they're so good but what we did is actually maintained her place by the whole group keeping more and more of her responsibility when she becomes less and less available and keeping her in touch with what we're doing when she comes back we give her back the things piece by piece and I must say I have some of the fantastic women in my group and it is not about women's lives it's not about prejudice not about what society should do it has to do with capturing the talent of women that the society is losing if we don't do this before I open the floor to some questions just Bruno since we were talking about this question about the statistics do you have specific data on women participation that distinguishes between women participation in the business sector and academia is there a difference there and which technical fields are women filing more patents in just so we get an idea of that yeah sure yes we have we have data for these two topics first regarding the business sector and the academia of course the business sector files about 90% roughly of PCT applications so obviously the vast majority of women that are listed in PCT applications come from the business sector but what is interesting is looking at the share of PCT applications with women within these two categories of applicants again because 90% of the business sector the share for the business sector is 29% is very close to the 30% the overall share but more interestingly is the one from the academia where we see that 51% of PCT applications include women inventors from the academia in 2016 so it's quite high share regarding the fields of technology here it's mainly where we see the highest share of PCT applications with women inventors it is in life science which would be the field of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, organic fine chemistry we have two others food chemistry and analysis of biological materials all having shares above 50% of PCT applications with women inventors the one with lowest will be in mechanical engineering I'd like to open the floor now for some questions I'm going to volunteer a couple of questions I understand that we have colleagues from the Republic of Korea and the Dominican Republic who would like to share examples of what their IP offices are doing to promote and reach out to more women innovators so if they are still in the room by a show of hands yes please sir Thank you Madam Chair I would like to have this opportunity to share our case experience as to how to enhance the capacity of the women's invention. Racial women inventors in Korea seems to be very high and I think lots of the factors would be related to these outstanding statistics I would like to mention two major things with close high racial women's inventions first of all Korea provides very favorable environment for women's invention I think most of you have already seen the movie of the Joey whose main character is Jennifer Loffence who made great success through the invention of the Clanny Mock even if the story is based on the real story however I was very surprised that ROK has a very similar story a very famous woman invented so-called steamed vacuum which has the function of the ventilation by using high temperature gas which made it slam down I would like to say that in Republic of Korea we can easily find a very good present of a very successful woman's invention further lots of the women are studying or working in the university related to science laboratories and companies are in the sector in addition I'm very proud of that we have lots of private sectors such as Korean woman inventors association who can provide the supports and assistance to the women's inventors secondly I would like to mention that Republic of Korea's policy and activities to the promotion of the women's inventors the Korean traditional property office provides assistance for commercialization of a woman's good idea further we also provide support for partner applications for their exclusive right under the umbrella of the provided support to small and medium-sized enterprise further the Korean traditional property office holds the exhibition of women's inventions along with private sector through this regular exhibition lots of the woman inventors including my two daughters are able to keep up with the new invention trend or social experience in some the woman's invention like a steamed vacuum greatly contributed to Republic of Korea's economic growth this reason why the Republic of Korea have fully supported and we support the woman's invention thanks for listening thank you sir please I'm happy that we are discussing issues that relate to empowering women innovators as Uganda we have done so many activities in ensuring that women innovators or innovations that relate to women are done by women are protected commercialized and the violations of rights are enforced I am the director in charge of intellectual property and we have done so many activities to promote women inventors first we have done workshops with the women association of Uganda it's called the Uganda women entrepreneurs association which has close to 2,000 members of which all are women so we hold workshops with them to promote their business enterprises but also the intellectual property assets and we are moving even beyond the city to the villages to ensure that women rights are protected we have also recently engaged the women that play a role in traditional knowledge and folk role we had a regional workshop that was supported by Waipo and we had so many women in medicine women in making products for the skin for the complexion for health that were advised to take part in their protection of the health of the community we have also looked at the young innovators in the last IP day of this year 2017 in April we had an innovations award where we are looking at different sectors medicine, chemistry, arts and all the different clusters and we had so many innovators and we did award some of them because they excelled in the exhibitions we as a country are also very concerned about gender issues Uganda is one of the countries that promotes women many of us have gone to school many of us have high positions and in our office we are actually more women than men we are about close to 70% if not 68% and we also work with the Uganda Law Society association to promote the women in law we also work with the women innovators to promote the women innovations so we have decided to partner with the key players the associations because they have the people they have the women they mobilize and we come and talk to them and lastly we also hold clinics, mobile clinics moving from one place to another with our mobile vans talking to people about the importance of protecting innovations and even when we go on radio and all this publicity and media coverage we make sure that we pick people from the private sector to appear with us as government on these stations for public confidence and trust and we call upon all our nations or all member states and observers to take the issues of women as seriously by ensuring that our offices position ourselves to promote the role of women innovation and the role of women in business I think is so much since we heard from what an IP office is doing and quite extensively perhaps I can give the floor to my colleague from the SMEs division at WIPO to say a few things that WIPO is doing in the area well I just wanted to make a short comment when we speak about women and innovation patent is just the first step and that's where we are still finding women in academic applications that they are equal or almost equal to the man where we are losing women is in the path of commercialization and that's where we are very much concerned and we are right now undertaking two studies in Asia in Philippines and in Sri Lanka trying to identify root causes why is it something in prejudice and stereotypes but you can easily imagine women which is for example proposing to the family to put the mortgage on their house for creating her own business everybody would say but she has a husband or she has a children so there are still prejudices which are impeding us even being very inventive very creative so women are equally participating in inventions but not in commercialization that's where we are losing our roles they are not CEOs they are not top managers because it's a risky business for a woman if you look also we did a study following the women in academic with academic career with great inventions would they follow it further to set up a start up even start up which is considered these days as a relatively simply to establish they would never leave secure career in the academic environment for venturing in something which would put in a job in a way which may put in a risk her family and the fund which is needed for the development of a family so it is the issue that we are very much concerned about five years ago we started in our evaluations to collect data about presence of women on a different level of innovation and we have interesting conclusions but it is not a study we are just recuperating making a databases and now we decided to do two studies in we are sponsored by FIT Australia in Philippines and in Sri Lanka to see where the women are lost in this path from a good idea invention to the commercialization to the market thank you. Yes from the Dominican Republic I am actually the director of the intellectual property office as white ball representative for women affairs knows we have been involved in the last two and a half years in trying to break the tendency in our country as part of Latin America especially the Central America and Dominican Republic region we have a very serious gap in terms of innovation it is very very serious and we have a serious gap in STEM careers so I kind of agree with Dr. Lee that once you do things they naturally tend to flow toward women and men naturally since we are beginning to promote and we cannot make any distinctions we cannot afford we have to incentivate everybody because we have to teach everybody but naturally the turnout has been like we have for example the pilot project that is now going to be adopted by the Ministry of Education we are still continuing with that pilot project because what enough is like our so small can do is just try to awaken the other policy makers because sometimes we only register we cannot make the inventors or the innovators the system has to make them but since the system is not making them we have to wake them up and make them realize how important this is for the economy so this is what we are doing so in trying to have a higher profile for innovations and inventions for the whole population then women and men are targeted equally but what has been the result for example we have a camp which is sort of a camp invention it's called innovation summer it's for high school that have shown even by the grades or by their abilities that have been focused by the directors at the public schools that they have some tendency that could be useful in STEM careers previously those kids will go to any humanistic careers even though they are talented so we are trying to screen them and in four months of intensive exposure to innovation hands on in a lab, in companies to see things they have not seen in their public schools they can make a choice and then we explain to them you have a talent and then your country needs your talent we have enough lawyers I don't want any lawyer to be offended but your country is needing engineers you know how many, what's the proportion of females in that that were selected because they are selected with a criteria that unfortunately involves grades 70% were women and you know the results 80% made a choice for STEM professions which is there are some of these professions that they didn't they were almost orphaned they were about to close like chemistry and in doing these little things we always teach them intellectual property with an idea an association with the Korean fund trying to make it make the child or they are not children to focus in problem and solution and then after I find my solution registration is a Korean model that we have been a fair series of that so as you see it naturally comes if you, if we have enough numbers as Dr Lee say it will come but in the meantime we need some we can suggest some positive actions in funding like to speed up the process if we are going to have funds like low rail funds we only have that fund okay we can have a positive action for these women in terms of spin-offs, spin-offs are difficult for everybody, women are men and in terms of commercialization it's always better to have a strong man in means of the business not as a female or a male it's a strong company well companies are male or female well they don't have any gender because when you have a partner with you you can't defend yourself because he's defending also his interest going alone to spin-offs is very very risky for women, for men for everybody so I think that what we need to also try to have these skills in the whole population of inventors is better to have a piece of a cake that is surely that is going to be a piece of a cake than pretending to have the whole cake for yourself because you are the sole patent owner because afterwards in litigations you don't have the money so in the beginning if you have something that's commercial value there will be a partner for that and it doesn't have to be a man or it doesn't have to be a female it's going to be a company which doesn't have any gender and it's a very important decision because everybody that has an idea and has a patent they think they have a commercial thing most patents don't reach market specifically like I come from the pharmaceutical sector 70% of patents fail so this must be very clear so that we avoid women having false expectations like if I'm not doing well with this spain off it's because I'm a woman it could also be have you check that this has commercial value that somebody wants this if somebody wants this you will surely have a company or a fundraiser or something that will go through with you and you will share the risk I think sometimes we use the prototype also if something went wrong it's because I'm a female it's difficult for everybody spainers are very difficult and also SMEs are very difficult I just wanted to share this experience that we're having and I do we promote the role of women through newspaper articles like our news department will surely content you to interview because this part of seeing the role of women that are successful like you in IT we're trying to bring a movement that's called women who code you know that from United States to our country to show girls since they are very early that coding is not that difficult so I hope that some of you could be available for the programs that we are developing because we do need these role models to be shown to our population of women 60% of women in universities population in my country are women so the numbers are changing and those trends will continue to balance I'm very optimistic about it I understand that Helen has a question to ask the audience as well I have a question to ask you I'm from the Institute and as part of the preparation for this I actually did a survey of something like 10, 12 women in their 30s and they would be middle management if they had stayed at work they would be top management because they're that good they happen to be child bearing age right so I asked them what is their problem what do they expect their institution to do without exception they all said they want flexibility at work so they can do part time they would like to be able to work get paid off normal working hours because sometimes they can only work on the weekend or in the evening and even their husband asks for flexibility from the workplace so they can share not all men who are male chauvinist pigs they want to share with the child bearing they feel as guilty as women do not spending enough time with their children so from this survey it was very clear to me that the flexibility of the workplace to preserve their career is not really there if it had been there then they will come back into the working workplace and carry on I mentioned earlier that the pattern percentage in my group the women they're 67% it's because they are in the higher echelons and they decide what experiments to do they become inventors so my question for you is how many of you coming from all kinds of countries and different institutions do you have an institution that really is flexible and to allow women to really come through to be as the high level with the same percentage as they were in the lower percentage I'd like to know who among you say which institution is that I bet you it's zero or two or one maybe and there lies the problem or one of the big problems right if I am right I understand your question you asking about whether in our countries there is a women in or no I meant in where you work that the proportion of women at lower level is similar to women in the higher level in other words there is not such a pyramid as you go up more and more men are at the top and that is really why if you look at in front of me my lawyers my pattern lawyers said well Helen it's really very simple there are more men at the higher level the more women are doing things and the men are directing things and that's why they become inventors and the other women are just doing their work I cannot think of any other way to explain the statistics I promise you I didn't do anything to make women more whatever it just that it reflected the demography of men and women so I wanted to know any of you can tell me your institution is flexible is a woman friendly job-bearing friendly and take care of the women's career higher up what does you actually mean by being flexible well for example the sometimes the flexibility these women are asking I can tell you because I don't have children but they are telling me what flexibility they have they would like to be able to work part-time job sharing and that they would like to be paid off our work because they cannot do the eight to five if the kid is sick or something like that so and they want to be able to also participate with the husband and having enough crash that is high quality and not so expensive it turns out they actually have an economic hardship when they are working part-time and often they are paying what they earn is gone to the babysitter so they were asking for this kind of flexibility from the workplace so to preserve them the opportunity to participate fully while they are going through the job bearing age so that they can come back and be at the higher level that's what I meant that's what they meant I think what we are saying here is that professional well-being and personal well-being need to be aligned and the question that Helen is saying and it goes back to what can we all do to create innovation ecosystems that allow women to thrive and what we are saying from Helen's experience is that the place of work needs to give the flexibility to women to be able to flourish and participate equally as men taking into account the fact that women have families have children and take time off work if I summarize correctly I think Daniela would like to say something to you please well my company is a small company but we have all the flexibility for women and men like if you want and you can work part-time it's okay if you need to go to the doctor it's okay like there is no an hour to to start working an hour to stop working it's just like the responsibility everyone has and that's how we work if we see in our company the three highest charges I don't know how to say it we are three women in those so it's like thinking about that we are humans that it is not only what we do is working and working and working that we have our family just a dad a mom and a grandma that who can be sick or a pet or whatever we are not right now in a world that we have to be sitting down and being on a desk in front of a single computer we can be everywhere and everywhere we can work and that will change many things in women or in gender gap I just understand we have a friend who has been working to promote gender equality in agricultural research would you like to say a couple of things about that fantastic hello everyone I apologize for being late but this is such an exciting conversation I'm so glad it's happening it is so definitely time my name is Wanchiro Kamar-Rutenberg and I run an organization called African Women in Agricultural Research and Development and our mandate is around building a more gender responsive agricultural research ecosystem for the African continent our flagship work is the award fellowship which is a two year career development fellowship for women agricultural scientists across the continent so far we have invested in about 500 women scientists directly through the fellowships and then an additional 1,000 both men and women who have been mentors to the fellows that we support and then each award fellow is then required to identify a junior woman scientist that they mentor through their career growth in some of the conversations that I've worked into what's exciting me is the things you're talking about are the exact issues that we're talking around agricultural research for us in Africa agricultural research is a huge sector of the broader research agenda and so being able to have these kinds of transformations in science in how science gets done is really important and I also want to just emphasize what I'm hearing you say about institutions and the role that institutions can play in building a conducive work culture and I just also want to emphasize that when you in some of our work beyond the fellowship is supporting agricultural research institutions become places where both men and women can thrive and innovate and what usually happens is if you have an institution that is catering to the needs of women then that institution is almost by default catering to the needs of a whole host of categories of innovators including men and young men who are becoming fathers in social settings where men are expected to engage more in parenting and so you're seeing young men also facing similar pressures around how they balance how they achieve work-life balance so to the extent we then drive a sector-wide response that yes makes it easier for women to innovate those benefits through across the system to both men and women and then finally just to close off by saying it does and I'm sure this is preaching to the choir but it really doesn't make sense for us to play with half a team by running innovation systems where only men are able to bring their best to the table for the kind and suddenly within the African context for the kinds of problems that we need science and innovation to solve it really then makes sense to play with a full team to make it possible for both men and women to innovate and bring their best solutions to the table so this isn't really about favoring women it's actually about allowing ourselves to benefit from the full talent and we know talent is equally distributed but access to opportunity is not so to the extent that we then expand access to opportunities so that the talent that is equally distributed rises to the top then we all benefit. We have a few more minutes left I want to give maybe a chance to our panelists to as I said we have a captive audience to basically say one or two things that you would like the policy makers and the people sitting in this room to take home and to see how we can better promote innovation among women. Daniela? Well in my case I think innovation is about everything like it's not about creating a technology it's about innovating how the place the working place is doing right now so we understand the person needs what the other person needs and how we feel as humans and how can we collaborate together to be part of the same company. That's how I see technology that's how I see my company that's how me and all the people who work with me are constructing a different culture in which everyone first is a human and then is a worker. Because of that women and men are equal and women and men I also agree are equal talented but if we give the same opportunities to both of them we will have what we expect that is the tool and the gender gap. So what I already mentioned in the beginning is where I see myself good at is generating ideas and bringing the right people to the table to innovate but what we are as an association as well and not very good at is the incubation part of the ideas because as we already heard it's not about having ideas but to bring it forward and maybe there is a chance for a more family friendly or child care friendly setup of innovation and this is not as we heard before not only touching women but also touching the men who want to become more engaged in the family and in the role model of the father. As we heard the new family types are kind of more fluid and there is a clear need of incubation where it's a lot of flexibility not only for women but also for men to take up their family roles and to promote that and one part which is crucial for me is also the funding. I'm working a lot with social entrepreneurs and the market niche is quite small and also the if you come with a product like with the body bags before there is clearly a need for body bags unfortunately but the margin is so limited that you cannot make a sustainable business out of that and when we are going back to Maslow and to the pyramid of needs I have to secure my family and my basic needs first and then later on I can think of IP and other things but I first have to secure me, myself and my family so I think there is a clear need of having accessible easy funding in order to have more space for ideas and then certainly also to think about IT and patenting and the sum. Thank you. Well I would be very disappointed if we just go away and had a nice moan. I was actually not surprised although a little bit surprised that nobody in this room raised their hands to say their institution is well maybe one or two. Okay fine great so here are the exception so it is a general reflection even of your generic ecosystem so I actually was wondering I don't know enough about the politics here but the DG was here what if you go back to your institution and in one of the answers I got in my survey was that the management the top management are all in the 40-50 they've forgotten what it is like to have child bearing age and the women's need and so I actually wonder whether it is possible as an action item that come out of this meeting that you go back to your institution to have a survey there must be women men and say from your institution shouldn't take that much effort for them to really assess how friendly your own institution is to women inventors or to patent to whatever to career and maybe that in itself is something concrete that maybe the upper management can think about it and even come up with some concrete suggestions it really would be a shame after all this we just go back and go back to their own way some action some meaningful action should come out of this meeting well thank you I think now I'd just like to wrap up thank our panelists for making the time to be with us today to get flying in from far and driving in from neighboring France as well just as a word of summary I think it's very hard to summarize everything that happened in this discussion which was quite interesting but I guess if I can say it in a nutshell first of all we should begin inspiring girls from a very young age perhaps when we see a girl we sometimes hear this when a girl is acting up instead of saying she's bossy she has good leadership skills and it starts there encourage innovation at an early age not to distinguish between boys and girls the education system has a big role to play professional networks need to be more flexible to encourage and inspire innovation and support innovation from both men and women and we can show more outreach in the IP system from IP offices from WIPO from other institutions to promote more diversity in innovation in the innovation ecosystem so thank you very much and we hope to continue the discussion formally and formally amongst ourselves and elsewhere thank you very much