Hapag-Lloyd might not score highly in terms of diversity at executive level, but the same can’t be said of its containerships.

Deep in the bowels of the 10,500-teu Santos Express (built 2017), a young woman is looking to make her way in that most male of bastions – the engineroom.

Svetlana Timm-Vengerov was still a teenager when she decided going to sea was the chosen career for a girl of German-Russian parentage.

When she was 17 years old, she went to sea as part of the holiday seafaring programmw run by the German Shipowners’ Association (VDR) on the advice of her godfather – a ship’s engineer.

“At first I thought: ‘What a crazy idea! Why should I try it?’,” she says in an article published by the German liner operator.

“But then I sailed with them out of curiosity.” After six weeks on board, it was clear that the engines below deck were her thing.

“Even though I hadn’t had anything to do with ships until then, I had always found mechanics interesting,” she says.

After earning her university-entrance qualification in 2014, she enrolled in a marine engineering programme at a university in the port city of Warnemunde in north-eastern Germany.

Hapag-Lloyd's 10,519-teu Santos Express (built 2017) passes Brazil's Sugarloaf Mountain Photo: Hapag_Lloyd

There, Svetlana learned “everything that an engineer officer has to know”, according to Hapag-Lloyd.

Now 26, she is a qualified engineer aboard the Santos Express, which sails in the SWX service from Hamburg and European ports to the Caribbean, then through the Panama Canal to the west coast of South America and on to Valparaiso.

At the time of the interview, she is about to embark on her third voyage with Hapag-Lloyd as a qualified engineer – and her first across the equator.

“In the coming months, I will be taking care of the separators, the air compressors, the wastewater treatment plant, and the five auxiliary diesel engines,” Svetlana says.

Her companions in the engine room will include a chief engineer from Poland and a second engineer from Romania.

What Svetlana also apparently loves about seafaring is the “different cultural mindsets she works with,” according to Hapag-Lloyd.

In fact, different nationalities are literally in Svetlana’s blood, as she has a German mother and a Russian father who had move to German many years ago for love.

Svetlana is one of three sisters, including her twin, Irina, and Jelena, who is five years younger.

“We’ve always been very independent, and it was normal for us for mom to go to work and for dad to be home,” she says in the Hapag-Lloyd article.

While her sisters didn’t become seafarers, but they did travel, with Irina taking part an an exchange student in the Russian city of Samara, and Jelena spent a year in Uganda as a volunteer.

Perhaps what unites the young women is not seafaring but a desire to travel, says Hapag-Lloyd.

In any case, Svetlana’s future plans will be both professional and geographic: “I want to make it as far as possible!”

Svetlana Timm-Vengerov. Photo: Hapag-Lloyd