There are only a handful of women like her.
Shawntel De Sagun has spent 10 years as a seafarer, experiencing life on the bridge of commercial vessels, just as accustomed to wearing a boiler suit as a white shirt with epaulettes.
And she is pushing other girls to go to sea through her social media videos.
De Sagun began her journey in 2010, heading to sea for the first time in 2014 and quickly realising she was going to be a trailblazer.
“At first, I didn’t think much about it. I was young and all I thought about was the adventure,” she said.
“But then I started to realise the small percentage of women who went to sea, and I saw it as something we should promote and encourage, because women have a future in this industry.”
Her biggest demand of the company she works for, Grieg Star Ship Management, is that it recruit more women, so those women in the company’s pool of seafarers are not the only females on board vessels.
Change in dynamic
When De Sagun talks about this, it is not from the perspective that having another woman on board is good company for her, but that the dynamic on board changes dramatically.
Grieg made a focused effort a decade ago to recruit young women from the Philippines so that they go to university and gain degrees and certificates of competency.
Stepping up, De Sagun soon realised she would be in the spotlight.
“It would be a big step and I would be a frontrunner, but I knew I had the support of the owners, as it was a goal everyone was working towards,” she said.
By Grieg’s admission, the move to diversify its workforce was not easy. Grieg Maritime Group people & performance vice president Jannicke Steen said the company wanted to encourage young women to consider careers, but needed to maintain recruitment standards.
In other words: there could be no favouritism in the application process.
I met De Sagun at an International Women’s Day event at the headquarters of the Grieg Group in Bergen, Norway. She had been on stage with her mentor, Steen, to talk about her career.
Grieg was keen to show off what it is doing on gender equality, perhaps no surprise for a company headed by two of Norway’s most formidable business owners, Elizabeth and Camilla Grieg.
De Sagun said that in 10 years at sea, working on 10 vessels, she has only recently worked on one ship with more than one woman on board, and it was then she realised how that could change the dynamic of life at sea.
Now a second officer with Grieg Star, she began her maritime life first as a deck cadet and then as a third officer.
“It opened my eyes that there was a big gap in attitude,” she said, remembering how a fellow seafarer told her she would not last the course.
“He told me directly: ‘I do not think you will last seven years, you will go off and make a family and stop sailing’.
“It was so disappointing. I was just starting my career and wasn’t being seen the way I wanted to be, which made me work harder.
“I over-exerted myself, which led to the point where I got into an accident.”
Having been working at sea for a decade, De Sagun now has a house and a husband who is also a seafarer.
She believes that when the time comes for them to start a family, things will work out, not least because Grieg has an initiative to support its female seafarers to balance a seagoing career and children.
As Steen said in the conversation, it is not about giving young women an easy way into the industry, it is about giving them the same way. They do not seek preferential treatment, just fair treatment.
De Sagun is adamant about her desire to become the first female master on a Grieg vessel, and in terms of being a trailblazer, she has more than 11,000 YouTube followers focused on her career.
