Arsenio Dominguez wants to take an active role in championing women during his tenure as secretary general of the International Maritime Organization.
He told TradeWinds the work was a priority for the United Nations agency and a personal one.
“The first thing that I did was to establish a gender-balanced senior management,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of the Wista UK 50th birthday celebrations in London last week.
But this is about more than just numbers, it is about giving women access to leadership positions, where they remain few.
“In the recruitment process, I’m focusing a lot more on bringing in women applicants in order to actually meet the vacancies that we have at a higher level of the organisation because that’s where we sometimes go wrong,” he said.
“We need to focus on the role of women as leaders so the others can follow it.”
The next step is making female leaders more visible and creating more opportunities for women, he said.
“That’s why I made a decision that I will not participate in any event where I will sit on a panel and there’s no female representation.
“For me, it’s not a box-ticking exercise; it’s the fact that even though shipping has always been perceived as a male-dominated industry, that perception doesn’t stand the test of time.
“If we want to modernise our sector, if we want to bring new people to the industry and we want to support women, we have to adapt and we have to change, and that’s what I’m doing — leading by example.”
The IMO has been assisting Wista in running its current survey of women in shipping, which will help identify some of the barriers and challenges they face, he added.
It also has its own internal Women in Maritime programme to engage more women from IMO member states, particularly those from developing countries.
The initiative aims to help more women become part of the regulatory decision-making process, involve them in implementation and as part of national administrations themselves, he explained.
“Diversity and inclusion are big priorities on my agenda,” Dominguez said.
