Abstract
Seafaring has been traditionally seen as a male-dominated occupation where women’s participation is extremely low in many parts of the world. In particular, Captains on merchant ships are often found to be men who tend to project a certain authoritative figure in the context of a ship hierarchy. Nevertheless, the representation of women in seafaring jobs has been recently more accepted though still a few. This paper discusses how the notion of leadership on board a ship can be challenged by female Captains and how they have learned leadership and applied in ship operations. Gender issues are an important part of human factors, impacting on crew’s relationship and teamwork under the leadership of a Captain. In this research, seven female and three male Captains were individually interviewed. An inquiry to female Captains and leadership will provide a new source of data for re-thinking human factors in the shipping industry.
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Acknowledgments
The authors express her appreciation to all the female and male Captains who kindly shared their views on their leadership and experiences at sea.
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Kitada, M. (2017). Female Captains and Their Leadership: Human Factors in the Shipping Industry. In: Kantola, J., Barath, T., Nazir, S., Andre, T. (eds) Advances in Human Factors, Business Management, Training and Education. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42070-7_114
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42070-7_114
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