WSI Mission

For a gender inclusive seafood industry

The seafood industry faces severe unprecedented challenges which requires profound changes in its management, exploitation and employment practices.

At global scale, women represent 45% to 50% of all seafood workers when considering the fishing, fish farming and processing activities.

Today, female workers are over represented in low-skilled low-paid low-valued positions and remain mostly absent at the other end of the value chain. Research data also tells us that high powered positions are to a large extent occupied by men.

This industry is characterised by pervasive gender inequalities. Placing Gender on the Agenda of seafood stakeholders is definitely part of the improvement strategy and WSI a key actor towards the solution. 

WSI-diagram-gender

The context

The seafood industry is facing new challenges i.e. human/women rights, resource overexploitation, climate change, digitalisation of businesses, new competitors…

Overlooking women prevents solutions to be effective. Only a gender inclusive approach can make solutions effectively sustainable. 

Women are part of the solution in this fast changing environment

We have one decade to meet United Nations SDGs, in particularly the Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower women
“Gender equity, gender equality, women empowerment” are part of the Corporate Social Responsability of a growing number of non seafood corporates.

Time has come to fishing, aquaculture and other seafood companies to adopt progressive gender practices.

WSI Mission

WSI aspires a seafood industry free of gender inequalities, free of sexism and gender based discriminations, where men and women enjoy equal opportunities to build a truly sustainable industry where the environmental, economic and social dimensions are equally taken into account.

Through its actions WSI has already contributed to increase the attention paid by stakeholders to this topic.

WSI Mission is to embark public and private seafood stakeholders in several projects to create the conditions for adopting gender sensitive practices and tools. WSI follows a three layers road (1) raising awareness, (2) advocating for a better understanding and (3) inspire practical changes.

WSI Strategy

1. Raise Awareness

Gender inequality is every where and has impacts, sometimes dramatic on individuals, communities and the industry. This issue is complex and takes many shapes. WSI works as an eye opener for all seafood stakeholders.

2. Advocacy

WSI works closely with decision makers to amplify the attention given to this key issue.

3. Inspire Practical Changes

WSI accompany stakeholders to adopt/implement new practices.

WSI Achievements

  • WSI has organised or inspired several high standard conferences and workshops (Boston Seafood, GSE Brussels, FAO-COFI).
  • It has inspired changes in policy with conferences’ organisers: cf. NASF which ambition to host 40% women speaker by 2025 compared to 19% today.
  • It has placed the subject on the media as never before
  • WSI is recognized as a first class source of reliable information on gender issues distributed to the industry via media, newsletters (articles, reports, WSI WATCH, etc.)
  • The #womeninseafood video competition created by WSI collects short stories, never shown so-far of women working in the different segments of the seafood industry.