Make no mistake, shipping is failing women
The proportion of women working in the sector has declined since 2021
For all of the back-patting the industry has done, the numbers make it quite clear that women are still not taken seriously in shipping
THIS year’s Women in Maritime survey shows the dinosaurs not only survived the meteor, but they also found themselves running shipping companies.
In the first survey, published jointly by Wista and the International Maritime Organization in 2021, then Wista president Despina Panayiotou Theodosiou said its purpose was “not to shame and criticise” but “inspire and give a basis for action”.
It might be time to start shaming and criticising. The 2024 edition of the same report shows shipping still is not taking women seriously.
The survey finds that while the actual number of women working in the industry has increased, due to an expansion of the global workforce female representation is now just 19%, down from the 26% measured in 2021’s edition. Women account for just 1% of seafarers.
In the private sector, women make up just 16% of the workforce, almost half of the 29% recorded in 2021.
But the public sector is hardly a shining beacon of diversity either.
Just one (yes, one) maritime administration, Argentina, recorded any women working for it aged 18-24.
But perhaps most damning is the fact that nearly half of the IMO’s member states didn’t bother to fill out the survey at all.
That is surely the most depressing result of all. Nearly half of the IMO’s member states aren’t just failing when it comes to female representation, documenting the issue wasn’t even worthy of their resources.
The Covid-19 pandemic might have played a role in the declining figures, Wista president Elpi Petraki said, with women disproportionately forced out of the workforce to perform care-giving tasks.
Whether that should be considered a mitigation, or an even greater indictment of the value placed on female representation in the workforce, is a matter for another day.
The overall picture is a depressing one. Despite all of the media coverage, storytelling and public rhetoric from maritime leaders, the industry hasn’t made any significant progress in a matter it should have dealt with decades ago. It has actually shifted into reverse.
Petraki’s understandable frustration with this year’s results was audible in an interview conducted at the IMO headquarters in London.
She said that in the past few months she had held conversations with men she thought had been left behind half a century ago, forced to justify why women are more than able to work on ships and make decisions in boardrooms.
“Why don’t people understand that?” she asked. “I think because they are hearing voices that are telling them women should be at home. Women should be at home, taking care of the family only,” she said, answering her own question.
“This is a conversation I thought we had finished 70 years ago.”
Petraki’s belief, that very loud voices in very powerful countries are emboldening beliefs many thought we had extinguished, is a concerning one.
The director of the civil society division at UN Women, Lopa Banerjee, said women’s rights organisations were being “starved of the resources they need”.
IMO deputy-director of planning and programming Louise Proctor said her team had plenty of project proposals simply waiting for investment. Trump’s war on diversity and inclusion and the rise of socially conservative politics in Europe recently will make that funding harder to come by, not easier.
Those that have worked in the industry for a long time might rightly point towards the progress shipping has made in the past few decades.
But acknowledging or even celebrating this, let’s face it, muted progress, is difficult to stomach.
For example, Diversity Study Group founder Heidi Heseltine said she had seen an increase in the number of organisations offering a two-piece boiler suit for female seafarers (though she noted plenty of male seafarers had opted for the new design too).
While this could certainly be counted as progress, should it be celebrated if it is delivered as late as 2025?
Is it “progress” that a lack of adequate bathroom or changing facilities is finally being recognised as barriers to entry for women, or is it, in actual fact, an unqualified disgrace?
Because ultimately, despite a wealth of back-patting stories that have been published — many of which you can read in this publication — the numbers display a grim truth: shipping remains miles behind its goal of becoming an inclusive, and therefore modern, industry.
