Strode LLP

For many years, many professional services organisations were afraid of allowing people to work at home. As an HR person I heard that all the time. The questions leaders always asked were: How do we manage that? How do we ensure we all actually work? Will we work or clock off early? Some might say those concerns were due to a lack of trust. And then, the office was taken away from us. We had no choice. Trust we must.

The fact that gender imbalance still permeates our society is acutely reflected in inventorship figures: only 12.7% of inventors named on patent applications are female. Gender bias in hiring, work evaluation, promotion and the overall climate of a STEM workplace are all factors which contribute towards this shockingly low number.

United Kingdom November 25 2019 The UK patent office has made a sensible clarification of its Formalities Manual in response to some test cases filed recently to see if an AI can be named as an inventor in the UK. The UK Patents Act leaves no doubt that an inventor is a person (see Patents Act Section 7(2)(a) read together with Section 7(2)(b)). There is therefore no room for an AI to be an inventor until such time as a programmed machine can be considered a person in a legal sense.