*** This event was been renamed to better reflect the event content***
Professional Identity Across Jurisdictions:
Insights from the UK, Australia and New Zealand
Thursday 4 June 2026, 8.30 am
London and online
IP Inclusive’s Women in IP invited colleagues across the UK, Australia and New Zealand to a special cross‑border event exploring new research on the experiences of women working in IP.
IP can be a high-performance game: billables, business development, partnership pathways, and a win or lose mentality. So when the “queen bee” trope pops up—senior women being disproportionately tough on junior women (or “self-group distancing”)—it’s tempting to accept the by-line that women are their own worst enemies. Don’t. This webinar brought real data to a topic often named, but rarely interrogated and misunderstood, drawing on interviews with 107 women across Australian and New Zealand practice (patent and trade mark attorneys, litigators, in-house, government and copyright). Attendees heard about why self-group distancing is often a rational response to gendered definitions of the “professional” and success, how women show an incredible amount of understanding and empathy towards one another, and how double standards can make the same behaviours look “deviant” in women but “desirable” in men.
Our fireside chat was a candid, practitioner-first conversation: what firms, partners, team leaders and mentors can actually change—without placing the whole burden on senior women.
Professor Jessica Lai (Victoria University of Wellington) and Dr Ronelle Geldenhuys (Jones Maxwell Smith & Davis, Brisbane) shared insights from interviews with more than 100 women across the AU/NZ IP professions. Their findings highlight the structural pressures shaping behaviour, collaboration and leadership, and the many ways women support one another within our working environments. You can read their paper about this, “Self-Group Distancing and the Burden on Senior Women: Intellectual Property Practice in Australia and New Zealand”, here.
This was an energising, solutions‑focused conversation about what firms, leaders and teams can do to create cultures where everyone can thrive.
The event was online (breakfast for the UK, evening for AU/NZ), with an in‑person gathering in London, kindly hosted by Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP, where Jessica joined us.
Meet the speakers
Dr Jessica Lai
Dr Jessica Lai is Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She specialises in intellectual property, particularly patent law, patents and gender, and the protection of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge. Professor Lai is the author of Patent Law and Women (Routledge, 2021) and Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Rights (Springer, 2014), and a contributing author to the Annotated High Court Rules (5th edn, LexisNexis, 2025). Jessica publishes widely across generalist and specialist journals, with over 60 peer-reviewed articles, and edits academic collections, including A Research Agenda for Intellectual Property Law and Gender (Edward Elgar, 2024, with Kathy Bowrey). She was named a Rutherford Discovery Fellow by the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2021. She holds an LLB Hons, MSc and BSc (chemistry) from Victoria University of Wellington and completed her Doctorate in Law (summa cum laude) at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Jessica joined Victoria University of Wellington in 2016 where she teaches intellectual property, patent law, marketing law, and business law.
Dr Ronelle Geldenhuys
Dr Ronelle Geldenhuys is a registered Trans-Tasman patent attorney and Principal at Jones Maxwell Smith & Davis, Brisbane, with over 15 years of experience in patent prosecution, IP strategy, and commercialisation across software-implemented inventions, AI, electronics, and telecommunications. She is a part-time lecturer in the Master of Industrial Property program at the University of Technology Sydney, where she teaches Patent Systems and Infringement and Validity. Ronelle publishes on intellectual property law and gender equity, with recent work appearing in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (2024), the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property (2025), and an Edward Elgar edited collection (2024). She is the Founder and Strategic Advisor of the ChIPs Australia and New Zealand Chapter, which she grew to over 300 members, and serves as Secretary of FICPI Australia. She was an invited keynote speaker at the FICPI World Congress 2025. Ronelle holds a B.Eng. and M.Eng. from the University of Pretoria, a Ph.D. in Electro-Optics from Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands), and a Master of Industrial Property from the University of Technology Sydney.
Who was it for?
This event was open to everyone and aims to connect like-minded IP professionals, including marketing, HR, IT, paralegal, recruitment, accounting, patents, trade marks, and whatever level you are at from trainee to senior leader – *everyone* is welcome to attend.
Cost and registration
This event was free. So are all our resources. That said, we do need money to keep the show on the road, so please consider making a donation directly. For more information, visit the IP Inclusive fundraising page.