34 SUOMEN MERENKULKU J FINLANDS SJÖFART
then create an action plan. It’s important for the Charter
not to be too prescriptive, says director of corporate
services Nicky Goldsbrough, so that the measures taken
are appropriate to each organisation. For example, she
points out, women are already quite well-represented at
the port in shore-based roles, including senior manage-ment;
the challenge is to recruit, retain and promote more
females on the operational side, which includes dock work-ers
and marine pilots.
Ms Goldsbrough will be looking at the Charter toolkits
and reporting back to the Taskforce on how useful these
have proved to be, and one measure she is keen for her
colleagues to try is unconscious-bias training. ‘It really
opens your eyes to how many snap judgements you make,’
she explains, ‘and when you’re aware of this it helps you
make objective decisions. You re-evaluate who you see as
the ideal candidate, whether for recruitment or promotion.’
There is an impressive momentum behind the Women in
Maritime Charter; something that was remarked upon at
its 10 September launch in central London. Julie Lithgow,
director of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, talked
in her launch speech of the spirit of cooperation revealed
as ever more maritime employers agreed to send repre-sentatives
to serve on the Taskforce. ‘At every step of this
strange journey,’ she said, ‘we’ve met increasing enthusi-asm.’
Where 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
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 male-dominat-ed
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 levels, throughout our organisation, and our industry.’
The next steps for Shoreham Port, as part of the pilot
scheme, will be to take stock of its current position on
gender diversity using a survey provided by the Charter, G Henrik Pedersen of ABP.