England's Shoreham Port has implemented several proactive measures over the past few years to balance the number of male and female staffers, but headway has not come easily.
These initiatives have improved the gender profile at the port of 120 workers to 80% men and 20% women — in 2018 only 15% were women.
"We've been making a couple of percent changes every year and it does add up," said Nicky Brown, people, communications and sustainability director.
For example, the port only takes female students seeking work experience, in an effort to bring more women into the industry.
"We felt we could make a choice and that's actually been very positive because we've had a lot of great students come through who wanted to have apprenticeships with us or wanting to go into maritime," she said.
"It's done what we've intended. It's got that interest sparked."
The port also joined UK Maritime's Diversity in Maritime task force and screens job advertisements and marketing materials through a gender decoder to ensure gender-neutral verbiage.
Other initiatives include placing more focus on ethnicity and LGBT to improve diversity and inclusion, she said.
'Taking strides'
"As a Diversity in Maritime charter company, we will continue to report our progress on an annual basis and keep taking strides forward with our action plan," she said.
Shoreham also prepared a Why Shipping Matters curriculum for local schools and has almost attained gender equality in management and board positions, including appointing a chairwoman.
"We're very vocal about how we have a very diverse leadership team," she said.
Shoreham has also placed behaviour over experience in recruiting board members in an effort to bring more diversity to it.
Shoreham Port, founded in 1760, employs 120 workers, about 25 of which are women. In 2020, it handled 1.8m tonnes of commercial cargo that included timber, steel, oil, grain and aggregates. The facility in West Sussex, England, offers almost 48,000 square metres of covered storage. It operates as one of the UK's 53 trust ports, which are run as trusts that are set up by Act of Parliament but governed by its own rules and statutes.
"Our logic was that if we say we want a benefit director with 30 years experience, the chances are that you're going to be selecting from a much narrower pool because you already have significantly more men in senior roles on the port sector," she said.
"We said we're going to scrap all that and focus on the behaviours that we need."
Shoreham also participates in an industry-wide interview pool of women that helps to ensure gender-balanced recruitment panels.
"A lot of organisations are saying it's a great idea but a lot of them are not using it," she said.
The port also reports its gender pay-gap data, although UK law requires only companies with at least 250 workers to do this, Brown said.
Shoreham's average wages and bonus pay are more than 9% higher for the men, port data shows.
