Inclusive Access to IP in Europe: From Representation to Reach

Inclusive access to IP for underrepresented founders, women in business, and the next generation

The European discussion about diversity, equity and inclusion in intellectual property (IP) is changing. For some time, the debate focused mainly on representation: how many women are named as inventors, how many women become patent attorneys, and how many women-led businesses use IP rights. Those questions remain important. Increasingly, however, a further question has come into view: whether the European IP system is sufficiently easy to reach, understand, and use for the people Europe says it wants to support, including women founders, younger entrepreneurs, and smaller businesses outside the most established networks [1]. The issue is not only European. According to WIPO, women accounted for 18% of inventors listed in published PCT applications in 2024 [8].

That question matters because access to IP is not only a legal issue. It is also an economic one. If businesses do not understand when trade marks, designs, patents, copyright, or trade secrets matter, they are less likely to protect value at the point where it is created. In practice, this can mean missed opportunities in branding, product design, technology development, licensing, and investment. The current EUIPO-led discussion is therefore well framed. The ECP5 Inclusive IP Landscape project treats inclusion not merely as a matter of optics, but as a matter of participation in business and innovation across the European Union [1].

The EUIPO report is especially helpful because it avoids an unproductive way of framing the issue. It does not present the objective as perfect numerical parity in every category of filing or employment. Rather, it asks what prevents broader engagement with IP and how that engagement might be widened [2]. That framing allows the discussion to focus on practical barriers. It also reflects the reality that IP is not an end in itself. The aim is not to encourage every business into filing IP rights irrespective of need, but to ensure that those who could benefit from IP can understand their options early enough to make an informed choice [2].

On the evidence collected by the EUIPO project, the barriers are real. Many European SMEs remain unfamiliar with the IP system, do not engage with it, or do not derive sufficient benefit from it. Some perceive IP rights as complex, too technical, difficult to access, or simply irrelevant to their business. The same report suggests that these barriers are not evenly distributed. They are often systemic and can affect women and younger people more severely because broader social and structural disadvantages overlap with IP-specific ones [3]. Seen in that light, underuse of IP is not merely a matter of individual preference or ambition. For some potential users, the system may still appear remote or difficult to navigate.

Accessibility also has a financial dimension. Although current European evidence does not clearly establish IP service costs as a gender-specific barrier in themselves, those costs may interact with wider inequalities in income and access to finance. That possibility is difficult to ignore in a context where women entrepreneurs continue to face more restrictive access to finance, and where EUIPO support schemes are expressly designed to reduce the cost of obtaining IP protection for SMEs. [4]

Recent EPO data helps to explain why the access question deserves attention in its own right. In 2022, women accounted for 13.8% of inventors in Europe. Startups with patents included a woman founder in 13.5% of cases, and women represented 29.2% of European patent attorneys in 2025. The same EPO material indicates that universities and public research organisations show a markedly higher women inventor rate than business companies and individual inventors [5]. Taken together, these findings suggest that participation narrows at several points along the path from research to patenting, from patenting to entrepreneurship, and from technical work to professional leadership.

For that reason, “inclusive access” may be a more helpful organising idea than a narrow focus on patent counts alone. Exclusion in IP is often indirect. A person does not have to be turned away by a formal rule in order to be left out of the system. The loss may occur earlier, when IP education comes too late, when advisers are hard to find, when support is poorly signposted, or when the language used to explain protection assumes too much prior knowledge. It may also arise when collaborative contributions are not properly recognised. WIPO’s recent work on women’s participation in innovation and IP places particular emphasis on structural barriers such as unequal access to education, work, credit, recognition, and career progression, and notes that women’s contributions in collaborative inventive work may go uncredited [6]. This broader view usefully shifts the discussion from individual deficit to institutional design and support.

For Europe, this is not only a question of fairness. It is also tied to competitiveness. The EPO expressly links its 2026 study to the EU’s Gender Equality Strategy, the European Research Area, and Europe’s ambition to reinforce technological sovereignty under the New European Innovation Agenda [5]. WIPO has recently framed the case in expressly economic terms, noting that innovation systems cannot readily afford to overlook half of the available talent pool and that underuse of women’s innovative capacity limits the diversity, quantity, and quality of breakthrough ideas [9]. If Europe wants stronger scale-ups, better commercial use of research, and greater resilience in strategic technologies, then more people must be able to move from creating value to protecting it thereby broader effective engagement with IP.

The European angle is especially strong because this conversation is now attached to institutional work rather than general aspiration. The EUIPO report describes ECP5 as a project under the Office’s Strategic Plan 2030 and explains that it operates through the European Union Intellectual Property Network, bringing together national, regional, and international IP offices and user associations across Europe. Its stated purpose is practical: raising awareness, sharing information, and producing recommendations that facilitate more inclusive access to IP across the Union [1]. This matters because it moves the discussion from abstract commitment to implementation. It suggests that the relevant question for European offices and advisers is no longer whether inclusion belongs in IP policy, but how outreach, guidance, and support should be designed so that more people can use IP with confidence and at the right stage of business development.

A further point follows: better access requires better evidence. If institutions do not know who is using the system, who is not, and where the points of drop-off lie, reform becomes harder to target and becomes speculative. WIPO’s 2026 Women and IP Symposium reflects this clearly. Among its main themes are the use of data and evidence to understand women’s participation in innovation and IP, the design of inclusive policies and programmes, career development and workplace culture, IP education, youth engagement, and communication strategies that reach communities underrepresented in IP [7]. This combination suggests that the next phase of the DEI-IP discussion may depend less on general declarations and more on careful measurement, practical programme design, and sustained institutional follow-through.

For practitioners, the lesson is straightforward, even if the response is not. It is no longer enough to say that the rights exist and that the filing routes are available. Access, from the user’s point of view, means something more basic: can I understand this, can I see why it matters, do I know where to begin, and does this system feel as though it was designed with businesses like mine in mind? Until those questions can be answered more confidently, access remains incomplete. That is why inclusive access to IP deserves to be treated as one of the most important current topics at the intersection of DEI and intellectual property in Europe. More importantly, it asks a constructive question: not simply who is missing from the IP system, but what further practical steps might help ensure that the full range of European innovators can engage with it effectively [1][3][7].

References

[1] European Union Intellectual Property Office, ECP5 Inclusive IP Landscape – Inclusivity in IP, Business, and Innovation (December 2025), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., p. 3.

[3] Ibid., pp. 5 and 12.

[4] OECD (2021), Entrepreneurship Policies through a Gender Lens, OECD Studies on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/71c8f9c9-en.

[5] European Patent Office, Advancing women in STEM: A data-driven assessment of the gender gap across Europe’s innovation ecosystem – Executive Summary (2026), pp. 5–8; see also European Patent Office, “Less than 1 out of 10 startup founders in cutting-edge technology fields are women,” press release, 3 March 2026.

[6] World Intellectual Property Organization, “Understanding Women’s Participation in Innovation and IP” (2026).

[7] World Intellectual Property Organization, 2026 Women and IP Symposium for IP and Innovation Offices (2026).

[8] World Intellectual Property Organization, PCT Newsletter, No. 03/2026 (March 2026); World Intellectual Property Organization, World Intellectual Property Indicators 2025 (2025).

[9] World Intellectual Property Organization, “Call for Papers: Women’s Participation in Innovation, Creativity and Intellectual Property” (2026).