Shipping is overwhelmingly made up of men, but not because women are disinterested or dissuaded from it, according to Anna Silva, who has been working in the industry for two decades.

Most women are simply unaware of it as a career, said Silva, who started out in shipping in 2000 as a teacher at State University of New York Maritime College and is now co-president of the Florida chapter of the Women’s International Shipping & Trading Association.

“I honestly think it’s a best-kept secret,” she told TradeWinds. “Very few people realise that that’s an industry you can work in. Unless your parents or someone you know does it, it’s kind of an invisible industry.”

Even women in port cities such as Fort Lauderdale or Seattle seldom consider shipping as a vocation because they do not see women working on vessels.

“It never dawns on them that there could be people on those ships and some of those people could be women,” Silva said. “If you can’t see it, then you don’t know.”

Silva, who has a master’s degree in international transportation, has also held several managerial shipping roles, the most recent being operations supervisor at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale.

She said the number of women in maritime has risen despite sexual harassment and other issues drawing the spotlight, but that the sector needs to reach out to students in school.

“Just bring the idea of the maritime and the cruise industry in there and let the kids think that is a job they could do,” she said.

“And we should visit maritime colleges to let women know you can be an officer on a cruiseship.”

Celebrity Cruises’ hiring of Kate McCue as the first American female cruiseship captain has done a lot to encourage more women to pursue cruise and maritime careers.

“That’s kicking the door wide open and saying: ‘Come on in, ladies. You can get to the top’,” Silva said.

The highest levels of gender imbalance in cruise — as in most industries — occur with engineering jobs, she added.

“From what I’ve seen, that’s probably your largest [imbalances] are where there’s room for improvement,” she said.