Delivering a data-led diversity baseline

The maritime industry has traditionally been male-dominated, particularly when it comes to leadership. Many companies are working on improving the gender balance – but there is great disparity in their efforts and their successes. For the industry to advance, we must have tangible measures of success as well as a baseline as a starting point to track progress.

The Women in Maritime - IMO and WISTA International Survey 2021 is gathering data to build an accurate picture of the proportion and distribution of women working in every sector of the maritime world. There are two separate surveys, one for IMO Member States and a second directed at the wider industry. Information from both will be collated and analysed by IHS Markit.

Need for the study

A diverse workforce is the solution to many of the issues that the maritime sector is grappling with, including the skills gap, agile thinking and more.

It is also a priority for IMO, which is committed to fulfilling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This project works towards fulfilling SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 8 on decent work and SDG 17 on partnerships. Data collected will assist in creating programmes and proposing policies that will increase the participation of women in maritime.

IMO Secretary-General Kitack Lim said, "Diversity in maritime matters. Empowering women fuels thriving economies across the world, spurs growth and development, and benefits everyone working in the global maritime community and beyond. We need solid data on female participation, as this will enable us to track and quantify our ambitions."

The study is one of the initiatives under the 2020 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by IMO and WISTA International to promote greater diversity and inclusion through enhanced cooperation activities in the maritime sector.

Aim of the study

This is the first data-gathering exercise of its kind in the sector. Information obtained will help build a snapshot picture of diversity and gender equality in maritime.

Despina Panayiotou Theodosiou, President of WISTA International, said, "Having comparable data is a key component when creating programmes and proposing policies that will increase the participation of women in maritime. It is an essential step forward. With our global reach we can amplify the strength of this survey to show real results and back our drive towards an inclusive maritime sector."

The results of both surveys will help lay the groundwork for further discussions on how to build a more diverse workforce. The data will identify any gaps in areas that should be addressed by policy, including training, recruitment, retention and progression to leadership roles.

Inclusion criteria

The industry survey is open to all companies active in the maritime sector, including ship owners, operators, NonGovernmental Organizations and InterGovernmental Organizations as well as service providers, including bunker traders, bunker suppliers, marketing companies, legal firms and more – so long as a company spends more than 50% of its working hours on maritime related projects.

All information should be filled in by a company's human resources (HR) department and include information for all staff, from support roles to executive level positions. If a company has multiple sub-brands, the HR representative should amalgamate the information for all the brands together and fill out a single survey response.

In some cases, large organizations may have a single arm dedicated to maritime and that this would prevent the entire company from meeting the 50% timethreshold for dedicated maritime activities. In such cases, the HR representative should treat the maritime arm as a stand-alone company and submit the information, as this is still vital to a complete understanding of the gender distribution in the sector.

All data gathered from the survey will be anonymised and aggregated to produce a report that will help create a data snapshot of the current state of the maritime industry's workforce, serving as a baseline for future surveys.

Take the Women in Maritime - IMO and WISTA International Survey 2021 by 30 June 2021

• NGOS/Companies:

https://www.research.net/r/

IndustryIMOWISTA

• Member State survey:

https://www.research.net/r/

MaritimeIMOWISTA

Section by section data entry is supported, allowing entries to be saved until “Submit” is pressed. Contact: womeninmaritime@imo.org