In a special International Women’s Day edition of FICPI Focus 45, three IP practitioners came together to examine what the evidence tells us about women’s experiences in IP practice — and what the profession still needs to understand.  

Sometimes the most meaningful conversations in our profession begin in unremarkable ways. In this case: tea, biscuits, and one person prepared to say, let’s just tell these stories. That, in essence, is how the research project discussed in this FICPI Focus 45 episode began. 

In discussions led by Ronelle Geldenhuys, FICPI Focus 45 Eastern Timezone Host, Secretary of FICPI Australia and a principal at Jones Maxwell Smith & Davis in Brisbane, the March 2026 International Women’s Day episode brought together Dr Jessica Lai, Professor at Victoria University of Wellington and Rutherford Discovery Fellow, and Maryam Khajeh Tabari, Lead Lecturer in Patent Practice at UTS Faculty of Law and Principal of Chrysiliou IP. 

Their conversation centred on a substantial body of empirical research already influencing how parts of the Australian IP profession are thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion - not as abstract ideals, but as lived professional realities. 

DEI as lived reality

As Maryam Khajeh Tabari recalled, the project started with a shared taxi ride to a client meeting. Accompanied by two male colleagues, she found herself the subject of a casual assumption: the driver gestured towards her and asked whether she was “the girlfriend”. 

The moment was unexceptional, and precisely for that reason, revealing. In its retelling, it captured something the three women recognised immediately: the accumulation of small, often unremarked biases that women in IP tend to carry quietly, and the absence of any systematic effort to record or validate them. 

From that starting point, Jessica, Ronelle and Maryam developed a formal research project involving in-depth interviews: typically lasting between one and one-and-a-half hours with 107 women working across IP practices in Australia and New Zealand. The resulting participants, included patent attorneys, trade mark practitioners, copyright specialists, barristers and solicitors. Crucially, the findings are not confined to any one discipline or technical background; they run across the profession as a whole. The paper was published in 2025 as “What do clients presume about women in intellectual property? Voices from Australia and New Zealand”, in Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property.    

What the research revealed and confirmed 

Much of what the research uncovered will, in one sense, sound familiar. Women in IP continue to encounter unconscious bias from colleagues, clients, peers and, at times, decision-makers. As examples, they are interrupted, overlooked, or mistaken for someone else in the room. 

Ronelle Geldenhuys shared a personal example: returning from maternity leave only to find her office had been reassigned to a full-time trainee, leaving her working from a desk beside the filing cabinets. She did not raise it, not because the situation felt acceptable, but because raising it did not feel possible. 

That instinct to self-silence emerged repeatedly throughout the interviews. Many participants began by insisting their careers had been unproblematic, only for a more complex picture to emerge as the conversation deepened. As Ronelle observed, once the researchers shared their own experiences, interviewees gradually felt able to do the same. One participant later reflected that, had she fully understood how carefully the material would be anonymised, she would have shared far more. 

What genuinely surprised the research team was the emotional weight of the process. Some interviews were deeply confronting. 

“Women were crying. It was harrowing, and it made us realise just how important this work is,” Maryam noted. 

For many participants, the research offered something they had not previously had: namely validation, a way to name experiences that had been normalised or quietly dismissed, and reassurance that they were not imagining patterns that felt very real. 

Adaptation, and the cost of fitting in 

The discussion also explored how different generations of women have navigated the same professional landscape. 

More senior practitioners often needed significant prompting before their stories surfaced; many had filed these experiences away decades earlier. Younger women were generally quicker to identify and articulate what they were encountering. Interestingly, many millennials described positive early-career experiences… until the conversation turned to them wanting to start a family, at which point a different pattern emerged. 

The research identified a statistically significant number of women leaving large firms not because of what had happened to them personally, but because of what they had observed happening to others, or feared might happen to them. Workplace culture, the findings suggest, is the main factor that shapes career decisions as powerfully as formal policy does.   

Dr Jessica Lai’s more recent work from the project examines how women adapt to professional norms that were never designed with them in mind: hiding pregnancies, modelling behaviour on the men in the room, showing up to informal networking events because that is where influence is exercised. 

As Jessica noted, these are often rational choices but they carry a cost, both to individuals and to organisations that lose the diversity of perspective they say they value.

What this means in practice 

The response to the research has been largely constructive, and in some cases tangible. One large Australian firm, Quantum IP, explicitly cited the work when reviewing its DEI practices. Maryam described this as among the most significant impacts of the project to date. 

The panel was clear, however, that awareness alone is not sufficient. Bias and more specifically unconscious bias is universal. The challenge is not to deny it, but to recognise it and develop habits that allow people to respond differently in real-time, including in front of clients. Bias exists in everyone, but in a professional environment it needs training. We need to be taught how to handle uncomfortable situations.  

For firms thinking seriously about recruitment and progression, Maryam offered a central takeaway: hire for values, not familiarity. Our tendency to gravitate towards those who resemble us, explains much about why firms continue to replicate themselves. Ideally, we should be hiring candidates who believe in and have the same values of the firm. Managing genuine diversity of thought is harder work, but the evidence on outcomes is consistent: the effort pays off. 

Jessica closed with a deliberately wide reflection: 

“I wish we would all be more thoughtful about everyone… about the fact that we can all feel ‘other’ in some way. If we could be more thoughtful about what it’s like to be in the world, that would be my hope.” 

Looking ahead 

When asked where the greatest barriers lie in 2026, the panel pointed to two obstacles in particular. Firstly, the assumption that the problem has already been solved. Secondly, a more difficult political environment around DEI that risks slowing progress. 

A third, more tentative concern was raised around AI’s potential to affect women’s roles in the profession disproportionately, a hypothesis not yet supported by data, but one worth watching carefully and discussed at FICPI’s DEIA Breakfast at the 2025 World Congress in Naples, Italy. 

For FICPI, conversations like this matter because they reflect how professional standards are shaped in practice: through shared experience, thoughtful reflection, and trusted relationships across borders and generations, the hallmarks of a profession that continues to learn from itself. 

FICPI’s view  

The FICPI community is built on trusted, global relationships. It uniquely combines education and advocacy on topics around patents and trade marks, with a focus on developing the professional excellence of its individual member who are independent IP attorneys from across the world. The global federation works to bring younger members and a diverse range of people into the profession. FICPI is driven by a strong shared interest to promote common solutions and advocacy for private practice.   

Next steps  

 

Image: posed by models

 

This article was generated by AI using careful prompts from our Communications Committee, review from our IP attorney Editorial Board, and editing from our expert editor. 

 

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