International Women in Maritime Day: Women remain significantly under-represented.
Posted on May 20, 2025 at 09:05 PM
In honour of International Women in Maritime Day this year, the IMO and WISTA International jointly released the findings of a new worldwide survey. Women make up an estimated 19% of all workers in the maritime industry globally, according to the survey, with significant variation across subsectors.
Notably, women still make up only 1% of the world's active seafaring workforce, despite dominating the fields of public relations, marketing, advertising, crewing, and recruitment. This reflects both the long-standing challenges and the opportunities for women in the maritime industry.
Examining the Fall in Women's Labour
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) stresses the value of encouraging a diverse and inclusive maritime industry, irrespective of gender. As the maritime industry transitions to a digital and decarbonised era, Secretary-General Antonio Dominguez highlights the importance of identifying and nurturing talent. Additionally, in all of its projects and capacity-building initiatives, the IMO intends to mainstream gender equality.
According to the survey, 16 per cent of shoreside and seafaring workers in the private sector are women. Compared to the 29 per cent recorded in the first survey in 2021, this represents a striking decline and probably indicates a shift in the makeup of the responding companies.
Likewise, the majority of the organisations and businesses that took part in this year's online, voluntary survey were new additions, making it challenging to compare the two surveys.
Although women are employed in shoreside positions at all levels, from entry-level to board-level, the general trend is still the same: they continue to face obstacles to employment at sea. Remarkably, merely 85 of the 179 shipowners who took part in the survey reported having active female employees on board.
Surprisingly, one business was transparent about its policy: “We do not hire women in offshore support vessels,” the company stated in a section for free responses.
Resolving Pay Gaps and Gender Stereotypes
According to a new Global Maritime Forum survey of maritime workers, 29% of women said that gender discrimination was a significant obstacle to their careers. However, the majority of respondents do not have a gender equality policy, and only 13 per cent of respondents try to address discrimination through bias training, according to the WISTA/IMO survey.
The Maritime Training Courses in Dubai aim to provide women in the maritime industry with high-level leadership and strategic management skills to address gender fairness, equality, and inclusion in the maritime sector.
WISTA International President Elpi Petraki stressed the importance of keeping the industry open and inclusive for both the current workforce and future generations. It is imperative that obstacles like gender stereotyping, workplace safety issues,
a lack of family-friendly policies, and the persistent gender pay gap be addressed.
Further, she noted, “It is my hope that the 2024 Women in Maritime Survey results guide the actions we must take to bring about cultural change, as we still have a long way to go in our mission to improve gender diversity and break the gender bias.”
Ultimately, Petraki and Dominguez presented the findings at a symposium on Saturday at IMO headquarters, which also included panel discussions on individual viewpoints and particular issues.
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