E QUA L I T Y
A NEW ERA There’s been quite a buzz around the Women in Maritime Charter this year, with high hopes that this well-supported initiative will finally lead to a breakthrough in the numbers of women entering the UK shipping industry. SARAH ROBINSON attended last month’s official launch event in London to find out more… here are the women? It’s a question the maritime industry has been slow to ask, because for centuries it seemed so obvious that females didn’t work at sea that nobody noticed how strange that was. Even now, in the 21st century, women make up only 2% of the global maritime workforce, but at last this waste of human potential has started to dawn on government and industry leaders. During London International Shipping Week 2017, the then UK shipping minister John Hayes challenged the industry to tackle gender imbalance. In response, the industry body Maritime UK established a Women in Maritime Taskforce in January 2018 to address fairness, equality and inclusion within the sector, and this led to the development of the Women in Maritime Charter – which was officially launched last month. The point of the Charter is to provide the means for employers to translate words into actions. It’s not so much a piece of paper with a list of demands as a package of support and guidance. Employers signing up to the Charter enter a process where they pledge to make changes, create an action plan, implement the measures in the plan and report back on progress. Crucial to the success of the Charter are the ‘toolkits’ that are being created to show employers how to go about recruiting and retaining more female employees, and
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Helen Kelly of Lloyd’s List, left of picture, who will be on the panel at the Nautilus Fair Treatment Symposium on 2 October; and Nicky Goldsbrough of Shoreham Port
Henrik Pedersen of ABP
ensuring that women are represented at all levels of their organisation. The first components of the toolkits were put together by the Women in Maritime Taskforce, whose members researched how other industries had gone about addressing gender imbalance. They then invited the maritime companies who were early signatories to the Charter to submit their own ideas and experiences of what had worked for them, and this input is now being collated into an online guidance package. Examples of information provided for the toolkits include: useful HR workshops; effective mentoring schemes; and proven ways to attract talented young women to take up a career in a traditionally maledominated industry. One of the first organisations to try out the toolkits will be Shoreham Port, on the south coast of England, which has agreed to take part in the forthcoming pilot scheme for the Charter. The port – like Nautilus International and over 60 other organisations – has already taken the Charter’s pledge, which reads as follows: ‘We are committed to building an employment culture that actively supports and celebrates gender diversity, at all
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