THE NEWS

According to Marine Insight, citing the ICS Maritime Barometer Report 2025-2026 — a survey of senior shipping leaders across the world — women account for just 1% of the global seafarer workforce. The figure has shown little movement in recent years despite repeated commitments from within the industry to broaden recruitment.

The report situates the gender gap inside a wider crew-supply challenge: an ageing and contracting pool of experienced seafarers that the industry has struggled to replenish. Notably, the surveyed executives expressed more confidence in resolving this workforce shortfall than in tackling other pressures, including regulatory compliance, access to government funding, and volatile freight markets.

The same report points to early indicators of improvement in seafarer wellbeing. An index tracking job satisfaction and welfare conditions rose in the final quarter of 2023, attributed to better onboard internet connectivity, improved welfare provisions, and greater attention to mental health at sea. On the training side, new baseline frameworks are being established to prepare crews for decarbonisation-related roles — including the handling of alternative fuels — and are being scaled through Train-the-Trainer programmes across maritime education institutions.

WHY IT MATTERS

The framing shift embedded in this report deserves attention. For most of the past decade, discussions about women in maritime were structured as corporate social responsibility conversations — important in principle, but largely separate from operational planning. The ICS Barometer report, as described, integrates gender diversification into the crew-shortage response. That is a structural reframing, and it has practical consequences for how companies allocate recruitment budgets, design mentoring programmes, and build career pathways.

For the Brazilian offshore sector specifically, the crew-supply dynamic is not abstract. Petrobras and the broader network of operators, vessel owners, and OSV contractors active in Brazilian waters depend on a qualified maritime workforce that is already under pressure from competing demand — both domestic and international. Brazil's offshore expansion, anchored in pre-sal development, has historically required sustained investment in crew formation. Any structural constraint on the global supply of trained seafarers eventually feeds into local labour markets, wage benchmarks, and certification pipelines.

The 1% figure also has a Brazilian institutional dimension. The Marinha do Brasil and ANTAQ oversee maritime labour regulation, while ANTAQ and the ANP together shape the operating environment for vessels and offshore installations. Brazilian maritime education institutions — responsible for producing the officers and ratings that staff FPSO support vessels, platform supply vessels, and anchor-handling tugs — operate within a training ecosystem that is not insulated from global curriculum trends. The Train-the-Trainer model described in the source, if adopted at scale internationally, could influence how Brazilian institutions structure their own decarbonisation-related curricula.

There is a workforce planning angle here that Brazilian operators and crewing managers should track. If the global industry is genuinely beginning to treat women as an untapped supply pool — rather than a compliance footnote — the downstream effect on crew availability timelines could be meaningful over a decade-long horizon. The offshore sector in Brazil already competes with the merchant fleet for certified officers. Expanding the recruitment base, even gradually, reduces that competitive pressure on a supply-constrained market.

The wellbeing index improvement noted in the report — driven by connectivity, welfare, and mental health provisions — is also relevant to Brazilian offshore operations. Onboard internet access and welfare standards on FPSOs and support vessels have been recurring topics in Brazilian maritime labour discussions. If global benchmarks are rising, Brazilian operators face implicit pressure to align, both to retain crew and to remain competitive when sourcing international maritime labour under flag and manning agreements.

The honest qualification is that a wellbeing index rising by a fraction of a point, and training frameworks being scaled through institutional programmes, do not close a gap of this magnitude quickly. The 1% figure is the product of decades of structural barriers — physical infrastructure designed around male crew, limited shore-based support networks, and recruitment pipelines that have historically not reached women in meaningful numbers. Acknowledging that the industry is now treating this as a solvable problem is analytically significant; assuming it will be solved on any near-term timeline would be premature.

CONTEXT

The ICS Maritime Barometer Report 2025-2026 is one of the more closely watched annual surveys of senior shipping sentiment, and its framing of gender diversity as a crew-supply lever — rather than a standalone initiative — reflects a broader shift visible in International Maritime Organization discussions and in how classification societies and flag states are approaching manning standards.

For Brazilian offshore professionals, the parallel worth watching is how Transpetro, OSV operators, and the offshore support vessel segment adapt their own crewing strategies as global training frameworks evolve. The intersection of decarbonisation-driven retraining and expanded recruitment is where the medium-term workforce picture will be shaped — and Brazil's scale of offshore activity means it will be a significant variable in that equation.