There is a new drive by women in the maritime industry in Kenya to aggressively mentor girls in learning institutions. They want more women in seafaring jobs, concerned that the gender representation in the industry is hugely skewed against them. The Association for Women in Maritime Sector in Eastern and Southern Africa Region (WOMESA) has initiated a campaign in secondary schools to inspire girls to consider taking up training that will lead them to senior positions in the industry. WOMESA is affiliated to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), and has chapters in Kenya, South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania and Mauritius. The Kenyan chapter has 250 members drawn from both public and private institutions. Acting chairperson Fatma Yusuf says the association’s strategic plan is to voluntarily encourage more women to train and pursue the top hierarchies in the sector. “We have to be proactive and train more women pilots, engineers and lawyers to be able to compete equally for jobs in the industry,” she says. “We have mentored girls from Star of the Sea, Matuga Girls and St Charles Lwanga. This initiative is promising, and maybe we are going to see more of them taking up careers that have been male dominated,” she adds. Ms Yusuf complains that women in the sector have traditionally been appointed in jobs at lower administrative cadres, such as clerks and junior managers. WOMESA’s mentoring approach thus focuses on ways to improve the situation by encouraging girls to train for higher positions in the industry. The concern of the association becomes clearer when the statistics are splashed. The disparity, it turns out, is a worldwide trend. Women represent between one and two per cent of the world’s 1.25 million seafarers serving in some 87,000 ships. Women in the Scandinavian countries make up more than 10 per cent of the seafaring workforce. The figures for other European countries are negligible. In Italy, women make only 1.2 per cent of the seafaring force. The figure is 4.2 per cent in Germany, while in the UK, it is 8.3 per cent. This is notwithstanding the fact that by 2001, the total number of female students at the World Maritime University (WMU) had risen to 21 per cent of the total university population, compared to only eight per cent in 1995. The other concern is that the bulk of women seafarers are concentrated in the hotel personnel of cruise ships. These are mostly in rating grades. Only seven per cent of women seafarers are officers. The rest (93 per cent) are ratings. By comparison, 42 per cent of male seafarers are officers and 58 per cent are ratings. Currently, OECD countries recruit the largest proportion of women employed on cruise ships, at 51.2 per cent, followed by Eastern Europe at 23.6 per cent, the Far East 13.7 per cent, Latin America and Africa at 9.8 per cent, and South Asia and the Middle East at 1.7 per cent.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 14:03:02 +0000
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