March 8 was International Women’s Day: a moment to reflect on the position of women in innovation. While the past decades have shown a clear trend of increased participation of women in innovation, gender parity has not been reached, and there are quite large differences between different European countries.
The women inventor rate, the percentage of women named as inventor on a patent application, also ranges widely in different European countries: with an 8% women inventor rate in Austria on the low end, and >30% in Latvia as the highest percentage in Europe.
When translating those inventions into real world applications, one of the routes to market is to found a start-up company. The percentage women-founded deep-tech start-ups for each European country is difficult to find, but it is clear that gender parity has not been achieved there. In fact, in 2023 female founded companies in Europe only received 2.8% of Venture Capital funding, highlighting the stark inequality in obtaining VC funding for women-led start-ups.
Recent data on European Women start-up Founders, the 2025 edition of the Female Innovation index, authored by the Female Foundry group, reports that in 2024 the deeptech observed a 33% venture capital on women founded companies, with synthetic bilogy, generative AI and drug development as the most prominent areas. Looking into regional funding trends, the UK, France and Germany accounted for a 58% of the total capital raised by women founders in 2024, with Denmark and Finland standing out for allocating the largest proportions of venture capital to women led companies, at 30% for Denmark and 20% for Finland.
As knowledge transfer professionals across Europe, we are uniquely positioned to influence the broader innovation ecosystem. The recently launched ASTP EDI toolkit challenges knowledge transfer offices to gain insights into how their decision making may be influence by implicit biases, and invites them to build a more equitable and inclusive innovation ecosystem.