IMO's Women in Maritime Programme: Four Decades On, Female Seafarers Still Just 1% of the Workforce

Since 1988 the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has run a Women in Maritime programme intended to widen women's access to maritime training and employment, including support for regional professional networks such as WOMESA (Eastern and Southern Africa) and WIMAWCA (West and Central Africa), and gender-mainstreaming guidance for IMO's own technical-cooperation work.
The programme's main evidence base is the biennial Women in Maritime Survey run jointly with the Women's International Shipping & Trading Association (WISTA), one of the sector's few recurring outcome-tracking instruments. Its 2024 edition, covering 176,820 women across the sampled maritime workforce, found women held just under 19% of positions sector-wide - down from 26% in the 2021 survey - and only about 1% of seafarers at sea, close to the BIMCO/ICS 2021 Seafarer Workforce Report figure of 1.2% (24,059 women) worldwide.
Despite more than 35 years of institutional commitment, the programme's own survey shows stalled or reversing progress on its core goal of women at sea, an honest reminder that framework-level gender mainstreaming and network-building are not, by themselves, sufficient to shift a deeply male-dominated occupation. Its clearest current value lies in the transparent, recurring measurement of the gap rather than in demonstrated gains - a caution against assuming that a long-running programme name equates to a solved problem.

Read the full analysis: https://www.imo.org/en/ourwork/technicalcooperation/pages/imo-wista-women-in-maritime-survey-2024.aspx