Birgit Liodden, who last week left her position as director of maritime event organisation Nor-Shipping to work for change, thinks shipping will clean up its act on gender equality and sexual harassment if HR data is tied to managerial pay.
"If you want to create change, you have to go where the money is," she told TradeWinds this week after announcing her career shift. The numbers shipping needs to reform itself are not quotas but key performance indicators (KPIs). "You have to tie the individual responsibility for gender equality to top managers' bonuses."
Liodden's new position with a Norwegian non-governmental organisation — which may or may not be activist group Bellona, where she is already a director — will deal with shipping and the environment. In her own time, she will pursue a separate project of her own devising — gathering information on gender equality and getting companies to exchange and compare data and create KPIs and best practices.
"2018 will be dedicated to working for women in shipping, not as a paid job but on the side," she said. "What I will be doing is kicking off the ball and collecting stories. I don't think there's a lack of will to improve."
Liodden, an outspoken participant in an incipient #MeToo debate on sexual harassment in shipping, has given frank accounts of gross harassment that she has witnessed or been subjected to. She plays that down now.
"The #MeToo angle is more tabloid," she said. "The big job I have to do concerns gender equality, diversity and unconscious bias."
The #MeToo angle is more tabloid. The big job I have to do concerns gender equality, diversity and unconscious bias
Liodden had already built up a non-linear CV before last week's announcement. She got her start in shipping through the side door, and that gives her a certain perspective on how to crack its glass ceiling.
As a 16-year-old, she quit high school and left her parents' home in the Oslo suburbs to spend seven years in a Norwegian peasant cottage with no running water, pursuing an off-grid career as a tractor-driving, fence-post-repairing pastoralist.
Eventually she found her way back to a more conventional life in the form of a temping agency and a secretarial course. "I got rid of some piercings and [in 2001] entered my first office job," she wrote in her blog, The Shipping Socialist. "And finally discovered it was no way near as square as I had thought."
After five years with shipowner Wilh Wilhelmsen, where she began as a "gofer" and ended up managing global projects, she felt ready to set up in business for herself as a third-party jack-of-all-office-trades contractor to shipping companies operating from Nigeria to India.
On the side, she was participating in a series of volunteer projects — or starting them herself — to develop talent, with groups including the Women’s International Shipping & Trading Association and YoungShip. Three years ago, she took the position readers may know her from at Nor-Shipping.
Along the way, she has kept close ties to her former employers. Her new project will involve Nor-Shipping as a partner, and she credits the good mentoring she enjoyed at Wilh Wilhelmsen for her consciousness of the industry's responsibility to nurture talent.
Her CV has clearly influenced her outlook in another way as well. Liodden's project takes companies at the larger and more (for lack of a better word) Scandinavian end as the default, even though they are not the norm for the industry as a whole.
The first companies on her list to visit are the ones that have a lot of data about salaries, retention and staff development. And in many cases, as public companies in highly regulated countries, they already have incentives to promote diversity and equality.
"The biggest companies also have the biggest organisations in place to work with people development and have programmes in place already," she said.
Besides being the ready source for the kind of data she needs, she thinks they have the potential to set an example. "Sharing stories about what these companies are doing could inspire the industry as a whole to think: 'Maybe we could be a part of it'."
