“Pink Patenting” and “Ever-Pinking”: Sex- and Gender-Targeted Innovation and the Legal Production of Difference
Professor Jessica Lai (Victoria University of Wellington)
Tuesday 20 October 2026 | 9 PM (Wellington, NZ) | Check your time zone
Calls for innovation in women’s, female and trans health are urgent and overdue, but sex/gender-targeted health technologies can also be co-opted into the ordinary logics of patent law, regulatory review and health-technology markets. This seminar introduces the concepts of pink patenting and ever-pinking to examine how appeals to unmet need and sex/gender specificity may support product differentiation, patent portfolio expansion, market segmentation and premium pricing, without proportionate benefit to the target community. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies, political economy, and patent, regulatory and judicial examples from the European Union, the United States, and New Zealand, it argues that legal and regulatory regimes do not merely respond to innovation, but help construct what counts as an invention, what problems are recognised, what evidence is required, and when sex/gender differences are made salient or rendered silent. The seminar concludes by considering how greater transparency, comparability and evidentiary discipline could help ensure that sex/gender-targeted innovation delivers meaningful health improvements rather than simply new market categories.
Jessica Lai is Professor of Commercial Law at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Jessica is a Te Apārangi Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Discovery Fellow and a former Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She specialises in patent law, feminist perspectives of intellectual property law and practice, and how intellectual property law interacts with mātauranga Māori. Jessica is the author of Patent Law and Women (Routledge, 2022) and Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Rights (Springer, 2014), and co-editor of multiple volumes – mostly recently, A Research Agenda for Intellectual Property Law and Gender (Edward Elgar, 2024, with Kathy Bowrey). Professor Lai holds a Doctorate in Law from the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and multiple degrees in law and chemistry from Victoria University of Wellington.