Intellectual property and gender inequality: towards sustainable development - or sustaining the status quo?

This chapter is concerned with the connections between the global intellectual property (IP) system and gender inequality. Goal 5 of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims to ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’. While the connections between IP and gender are not widely acknowledged, this chapter identifies the IP system’s complicity in sustaining and compounding gender inequality and considers the possibility that changes to the IP system could bring about a more equal society. Section 1 begins by acknowledging some scepticism around the transformative promise of the SDGs and the potential for IP law to meaningfully advance them. Section 2 explores the relationship between gender inequality and patent law, describing and critically reflecting on the significance of the patent gender-gap. Section 3 then turns to consider copyright law and the growing evidence of its gendered implications. In both respects, the discussion critiques the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for its complacent certainty that an expansive international IP system will support innovation and creativity, which will in turn advance sustainable development and gender equality. The chapter concludes by bringing a relational feminist argument to bear in order to critique the neoliberal assumptions that pervade the SDGs and WIPO’s response to them.