The Programme of the on-going WIPO Conference on IP and Public Policy Issues is quite astonishing in one respect. Its gender Insensitivity! Among the 31 speakers and moderators for the two day conference there are only three (3) women one of which is the head of a UN agency. In some sense you can think of it as a conference of 28 men and 3 women. It reminds you of another recent major event, the G20 London summit which was a summit of 18 men and 2 women. For the WIPO Conference, gender is particularly important when you consider the key issues under discussion – climate change; public health; and food security. In my earlier post on the conference, I mentioned that the programme could have been better. The gender issue is probably the most glaring.

WIPO as a UN agency needs to pay more attention to some basics such as gender balance in such conferences and obviously among staff. For this conference, probably responsibility goes more for Member States who were intensively consulted on the programme. But the Secretariat and the Director General need also to remind Member States of some of these basic things that are widely acknowledge in the UN system. If the patent system is to address public policy issues, it should probably become more gender balanced.