Exploring the Discrimination Factors of Marine Women Officers Onboard

Abstract

Seafaring is a challenging working environment for women. For the last two decades, mainly in western countries, women have been showing their existence in the fleet, but as the chief marine, women officers such as captain, executives, or leader posts aboard are very poor with respect to other services. In practice, women continuously face many problems from working environments, and it may be very high in seafaring. The current article aims to determine the factors related to discrimination of women officers (DOWO) onboard based on a data set containing 149 female officers’ responses from 18 different countries. The aimed response DOWO is marked as heteroscedastic. It is derived that the mean (or average) of DOWO is directly linked to women nationality (Spanish = 1; Others = 2) (P=0.0022), while it is reciprocally linked to her professional qualification (P=0.0290) and their male companion’s support (P<0.0001). The DOWO’s variance is reciprocally linked to women nationality (P= 0.0356), while it is directly and partially linked to their age (P=0.1343) and contract’s type (P=0.0799). It is observed that women officers with Spanish nationality, higher qualifications and their male companion’s support can reduce the degree of discrimination against women.