Ahoy Femaley!
Women like Aysun Akbay, a 24-year-old Turk, are slowly making inroads into the upper levels of seafaring, a profession more resistant than most to female command. Women have long worked on passenger ships, but they are increasingly enduring the risks and hardships of life on merchant vessels, a key engine of global commerce.
Akbay was recently captured by pirates (seriously people) who are holding about 100 mariners captive for ransom. So far, it appears that Akbay is actually being treated better than the rest of the male captives, allowed to call her family. She uses the special permission to call other sailors' families as well.
The AP also reports:
Founded in 1974, the Women's International Shipping & Trading Association, or WISTA, reported a membership increase of 40 percent in the past two years, with 20 country branches and more than 1,000 individual members.
Fascinating, right?
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Ahoy Femaley!.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/16033
The 40% increase doesn't surprise me at all. I have a "captain" design in my shop and it has been a pretty popular character.
Kudos to Aysun Akbay for her hard work and perseverance.
wow! we need to hear more about women like this on a regular basis :)
Freakin' pirates. You know, it's as much the fault of industrialized nations as of the pirates when a commercial ship gets hijacked, because they prepped the ship for attack by making it illegal for them to arm themselves. When was the last time you heard of a warship getting hijacked, despite the huge value of the materials they carry? It wouldn't be hard for a shipping company to defeat modern pirates if they were allowed to, so it's pretty ridiculous that governments let this go on and then act like they're helping when they rescue people.
Its not that its illegal--they're in international waters they can do whatever they friggin want--its that the shipping companies don't want to. Sometimes its because it skyrockets the cost of shipping insurance, or makes it entirely unavailable. Other times its because they think that its less safe--ie, why start a firefight they can't win? Merchant marine vessel, even armed, wouldn't carry nearly the arms--or the people--that a warship would. Even many of the security outfits that the shipping companies hire don't use guns & instead go for non-lethal forms of protection.
It's worth considering what arming merchant vessels entails.
Firstly, it's asking for the merchant sailors to kill people.
Secondly, it's asking for merchant sailors to risk armed confrontation with pirates. If pirates have an expectation that sailor won't resist them with lethal force, they're less likely to summarily kill all the sailors aboard.
Thirdly, and this may just be me, it brings to mind the question of what's being done to the pirates' homeland as opposed to that of the sailors. Crimes against property can be crimes against people if, for instance, there's illegal dumping of toxic waste or overfishing is starving people.
I apologize for the digression, but I'm not convinced that feminism and economics are separable. Regardless, Aysun Akbay is an inspiration.
Women on merchant ships are still rare, but the percentage is increasing. My eldest son is an engineer in the merchant navy (although he's currently working on a tall ship) and there were several woman cadets in his year at college (in the UK). They were all deck cadets though, that is they will work on the bridge, not down in the engine room.
He did meet one female engineering cadet, on one of his training stints at sea. It was a ship with Russian officers and Filipino crew (it's common for the able seaman, the non-officers, to be from the Philippines) and she was a Scottish mature student in her mid-twenties on her third and last sea-training phase. The Russian Chief Engineer wouldn't let her do any of the dirty, heavy work, even though doing so was essential to her training and she would fail that part of the course (and have to re-sit, which would mean another 6 month long training stint at sea) if she didn't complete certain physical tasks.
My son, just 18 years old, on his first training trip to sea, was appalled at this. He knew exactly how this would fuck up her training and felt a sense of personal grievance as well, as he was given her nasty jobs to do on top of his own - and some of them are very nasty as the engineers run all the systems on the boat, including the sewage system... He was also slightly confused as he was raised in a feminist atmosphere and it had never occurred to him that this sort of discrimination was possible. After all, he'd seen me, his mother, fix the car, research and teach as a post-grad engineer in a university, cook, clean, sew, raise kids and ride motorbikes and he'd seen his step-father (also an engineer) do *exactly the same*.
So he went on strike. Refused to do anything until she did too. This was a riskier strategy than it sounds. Remember that the Captain is the law on a ship in international waters and this was essentially a form of mutiny.
His refusal to work until his female colleague was allowed to as well confused the hell out of the Chief who insisted that not allowing the woman to do her job was in some way gallant as women shouldn't be getting all oily and sweaty.
My boy stuck to his principles and it worked. His colleague got to complete her training tasks and work as her role as an engineer demanded. So proud of him.
Got to admit I still worry about how that young woman fared on her next ship. If she had any sense she'd pick ships run and crewed by Scandinavians, British or Americans.
I do voluntary work at the local seaman's club (they're all over the world and offer a home-from-home for those who work in the merchant fleet), and so far, in the 18mths I've been there, have only met one female sea-farer, a deck cadet from the Ukraine.
Oh and Alice, the Seamans' Unions are vehemently against being armed. These ships are run on an incredibly tight and diminishing budget (at the club we often hand out food parcels to the cooks on ships as their food budgets are sometimes too tight to allow them to buy enough food for the crew in expensive places like Northern Europe) and arming would be expensive. And these guys are civilians, not military, my son knows how to re-build an engine, not fire a gun. Arming the crew would just lead to an arms race with the pirates that the crew would loose. The crews are also small, typically 10 to 15 people even on the enormous tankers. If you want to have armed folks on board then you need Marines, in the 18th and 19th Century British Merchant Navy sense.
Wanna know what the current pirate drill is? Note that my son very carefully didn't share this with me until after he'd got home.
In pirate-infested waters all the fire hoses are connected up and laid out on deck. A 24 hour watch is kept, only one man, patrolling the deck (my lad's turn was the wee small hours shift). If he sees suspicious small boat movements he raises the alarm and then turns the fire-hose on the pirates. That's it. That's the drill.
At least that's what the company manual says. It's not what happens as, as my boy said, so you've got these armed, desperate, pirates boarding you. How does it help to turn them into armed, desperate and angry and wet pirates?
What actually happens is that the alarm is raised and then the whole crew locks themselves into a secure cabin and hopes that the pirates are just after the safe containing the crew wages. I am very glad that he's not sailing those waters anymore.
Thus endth the lesson for today. Sorry for blathering on, but as you've guessed, it's a subject close to my heart.
Splendid post,and best of luck for your son and his fellows.
I just don't get it.
It's cheaper to let a ship be taken by pirates, cargo and cash be stolen, and possibly for hostages aboard to be murdered than it is for the crew to be armed and ready to launch a rocket of their own at a pirate ship?????
I'd be reluctant to insure a ship that DIDN'T arm themselves.
Sounds like some kind of weird cost-plus conspiracy to keep the owners rolling in cash while the layperson suffers.
How absolutely evil.
99% of the time the pirates are after ransom, and yes it's cheaper to pay than protect.
Any cargo they're after is more likely to be smuggled drugs or diamonds hidden in the legal cargo than the cargo itself. For a start on most ships there'd be more stuff (containers, grain, oil, chemicals whatever) than the pirates would have the infrastructure to handle.
An older seaman told my son how his ship was boarded off the coast of Brazil. The pirates went directly to a particular container, opened it and took out some of the contents. They knew exactly which one they were looking for; remember there are hundreds of identical containers on a ship.
And like I said, every mariner I've met is certain they don't want to be armed.
The solution is for the major seafaring nations: China, the US, France, the UK and so on, to stop reneging on their responsibilities and patrol the high seas again.
If you're cross about this lobby your political representative. After all, our entire planetary economy depends on these ships (not an exaggeration, no one country is completely self-sufficient in its raw or manufactured materials anymore).