Learning from Global Practice: What India Can Adapt to Improve Women’s Employment in Seafaring

Women are much underrepresented in seafaring globally, even though there is increasing policy interest and labour shortages continue to persist in the maritime industry. Study has found several obstacles in the seafaring career cycle, but little focus has been placed on global practises bearing an adaptable meaning to labour-supply situations like India. This paper discusses the perceptions of the experienced stakeholders in relation to the international practises in women seafaring employment and determines the viability of this through the Indian maritime workforce. The study uses a qualitative, interview-based research design and uses semi-structured interviews with a sample of 20 academia, policy, regulation, consultancy, port administration, and training institution specialists as a source of information. The discussion determines sea-time access, onboard working conditions, and career progressions as the key transition points determining the employability of women. The evidence suggests that better results can be related to synchronised governance structures, explicit employer roles, and plausible enforcement systems, whereas ineffective outcomes are linked to disjointed institutional structure and voluntary actions. Notably, analysts note that the policies that worked in the OECD setting cannot be copied directly onto India without any change in the regulatory capacity, labour-market practises, and employer incentives. The study makes a contribution to the scholarship of adaptation-oriented perspective to seafaring employability, and provides policy implications to the government, regulators and market actors to increase gender representation and the sustainability of the Indian labour market in the maritime labour market.