Tuesday, 25 June, was the tenth annual International Day of the Seafarer, and the theme for 2019 is “I am onboard with gender equality.” It was in this spirit that Fishing for Success—a non-profit social enterprise promoting popular engagement with the fishery—convened a panel of women working in the maritime sector to discuss the challenges and opportunities in making a living at sea.
The summit was a brief but illuminating session. It was a frank discussion about the barriers women face in a culturally—and materially—male-dominated industry.
Women have been the backbone of the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery for centuries. Earning that recognition is reshaping the maritime world.
About a century ago, roughly 80% of Newfoundland’s population was directly or indirectly working in the fishing industry. That figure was 30% on the eve of the 1992 cod moratorium, and by 2014-2015 it was less than 2%.
Only about 20% of those working in the fishery are women.
“People need to see others like themselves [represented in the workforce] if they’re going to start imagining themselves in those careers,” Kimberly Orren, co-founder of Fishing for Success, told the audience.
Panelists Jasmine Paul, a new apprentice fisher on her parents’ boat, and Crystal Hanlon, a marine engineer working as an instructor at the Marine Institute, voiced their agreement. Both encountered negative attitudes and stereotypes about women working on the boats.
Paul heard more than a few times that a woman would only be fishing if she was uneducated, lazy, and looking for E.I. Hanlon recalled instances where frustrations with orders, conditions, or language barriers erupted as frustration at the very presence of a woman on the ship. Orren evoked her uncles standing around the wharf and calling her a jinker: someone whose presence brings bad luck at sea.
Dr. Nicole Power, a sociologist at Memorial University, told the room that the depreciation of women’s labour in the maritime sector is an old and common problem. She then summed up fifty years of feminist scholarship on the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery into two main lessons:
The first is that we need to expand how we think about how our fishery. It is embedded in a web of domestic, family, and community relations. It goes beyond the basic level of jobs and commodity production.
“Early feminist research [in NL] focused on revealing women’s work,” Power explained. Men were on the boats fishing, but women were processing the fish, mending the gear, raising the children, baking the bread, and doing all the other unpaid domestic labour necessary to support the work out on the water.
“Women have always been working in the fishery,” Power continued. “The problem is their labour is undervalued as ‘work.’”
This divide can still be seen across many traditionally male-dominated industries. An enduring culture of devaluing women and their work, Power suggested, is why targeted programs encouraging women to enter science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) career streams tend to be successful at getting them to start—but not in getting them to stay.
The second lesson is that often seemingly gender-neutral fisheries policies have been shown to advantage men and disadvantage women. Citing one example of retirement buyouts for lobster license-holders, Power said that in many fishing households, women had no choice whether to remain in the lobster fishery if their husband decided to retire.
Because ownership of fishing licenses goes to the highest bidder, control of the industry is increasingly concentrated into a smaller circle of larger owners. This further entrenches inequality in the fishery. The biggest barrier for both men and women in the fishery, Power emphasized, is the sheer financial cost of entry.
See more (including the second half of this article) at: https://theindependent.ca/2019/...shing-is-female/