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Celebrating Women in Maritime

Posted on Tuesday, April 28, 2020

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WOMEN IN MARITIME

We are now two weeks away from launching our Diversity in Maritime programme and we want to take a brief moment to pause, reflect and, most importantly, celebrate the fabulous foundations laid by Women in Maritime.

The Women in Maritime Network will form a key pillar of the Diversity in Maritime programme and its initiatives will continue to grow from strength to strength.

In 2018 the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers working with partners through Maritime UK, established the Women in Maritime programme.

Women in Maritime was established with the aim of addressing gender fairness, equality and inclusion within the maritime sector. An open-community of leaders, and all levels, were brought together to progress this by creating a range of initiatives.

Women in Maritime initiatives

The Pledge:

The Women in Maritime pledge is the first step to becoming a Women in Maritime Charter company.

Signatories to the pledge make clear their support for creating positive change within their respective organisations, and collectively, across the UK maritime sector. Each pledge signatory has the opportunity to profile their work to improve diversity within their respective organisation.

To date over 120 companies have signed the Pledge and we are working to increase this number.

The Charter:

The Women in Maritime Charter was launched in September 2018 during Maritime UK Week.

The Charter creates a framework to challenge companies to make progress on gender diversity and is supported by a suite of 'toolkits' and resources to help companies realise those targets.

Charter companies are required to agree an 'action plan', setting out individual targets for each participating company. A key commitment is that companies identify a member of senior management responsible for implementation of the action plan as well as distributing a survey to staff on workplace culture. Performance against action plans will be self-assessed via online portal and national performance published in a joint industry-government report.

Six companies are Charter Certified, and we are looking forward to announcing more Charter companies soon.

Speaker Bank:

We are passionate about ensuring there is diversity of thought on all speaking panels and to do this we need a gender balance. We also know it can be challenging for organisations to find female speakers from the maritime sector. The Speaker Bank is an initiative which was developed to assist this. The Speaker Bank provides a portfolio of female speakers spanning a range of different roles, levels and sectors across the maritime industry.

We are always seeking more women to join the Speaker Bank sign-up here.

Interview Pool:

The interview pool has been set up to assist maritime organisations access other women in the sector to help with recruitment, enabling gender balanced interview panels to be created. We have seen several companies successfully use the pool and we hope more companies will be able to utilise it. Feedback has included

Nigel Jardine, Harbour Manager - Langstone Harbour Board: "I believe that being able to reflect the diversity of our candidates in our interview panel was key to the successful conclusion of our recruitment campaign"

Richard Ballantyne, Chief Executive - British Ports Association: "It was invaluable to have an outside view feeding into our recruitment decisions and also a great help in terms of running a process which, because of our size, is something we rarely undertake".

Toolkits:

Our Women in Maritime Toolkits are resources designed to help companies make progress against gender diversity commitments. These include case studies; long-term projects and quick wins. We are working to update our toolkits to ensure we have a range of best practice guide and resources to assist our sector. If you have a guide or resources you are willing to share please  contact us.

Get involved!

Our Women in Maritime Network is run as an open-community and we are always pleased to welcome new members and fresh ideas. If you are interested in joining the Network and wish to utilise and/or get involved in one of our programmes please use the  form or contact Chrissie Clarke.

Remember to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn

You can learn  more about the new networks we will be launching as part of Diversity in Maritime programme  here.


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