On 13 February, from 12:30 to 13:30, in Room 9.1.1 at DEMaC, Helena Vieira, a researcher at CESAM & DAO, will present the Ocean Break seminar entitled “Navigating troubled waters for gender balance in the EU Blue Economy”.

Today we live in a world context of particularly difficult circumstances affecting Europe – several ongoing wars and geopolitical turbulence, severe climate change impacts, on top of the already substantial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, these events have played a particularly harsh blow in constricting even more female workers capacities and are an additional burden on gender equality in general. Such extraordinary circumstances reinforce the need to not only accelerate the green transition and improve the autonomy, resilience and sustainability of the European economy, but also the urgent need to foster recovery and resilience for women professionals across EU.

The Blue Economy is still a traditionally male-dominated economy, particularly in its established sectors. In fisheries for example, women constitute nearly half of those employed globally, and also make up most of the workforce in coastal and maritime tourism. However, they are still the lowest paid and face glass ceilings when it comes to top level positions and decision power in organizations. Data is scarce both across EU member states but also across Blue Economy sectors, particularly the more technological and emergent ones like Marine Biotechnpology, robotics or marine renewable energies.

It is precisely to fill in these knowledge gaps, as well as to promote capacity building for women that WIN-BIG was designed. The main objective of WIN-BIG is to expand our knowledge data set on gender in the EU Blue Economy across all 6 EU sea basins and foster a more gender balanced and gender adapted sector using a bottom-up approach. The latest results of this project will be presented and debated with the audience.