Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.-based nonprofit Seafood and Gender Equality (SAGE) announced the launch of its Speakers’ Bureau for the Seafood Sector on 8 March, 2023, coinciding with International Women’s Day.
The new platform, it said, will help drive momentum to encourage inclusivity and diversity for conference and event organizers, and help provide conference planners and managers the ability to find and place a wider range of speakers on panels and in other public forums.
“The seafood sector is highly diverse. Clearly, there is a need to reflect that, and to give voice to the experiences and achievements of women and people of color. SAGE's Speakers’ Bureau for the Seafood Sector provides a valuable platform for organizations striving for increased inclusivity,” Lisa Goché, a seafood industry veteran and the former vice president of Grobest Seafood Global Inc. said.
The speakers’ bureau is hosted on SAGE’s website, and panel organizers can browse speaker profiles and explore their varying areas of expertise. On average, 31.6 percent of speakers at major seafood conferences and events were women. Between 2018 and 2019, 19 percent of panels at seafood conferences globally had no female representatives. A lack of female representation on global panels continues to be the norm at many seafood conferences and events in North America, Kuchepatov said.
“I attend a lot of conferences and it’s disheartening to see a manel or a panel lacking diversity when I know there are so many qualified experts in this industry that represent historically excluded demographics. We hope that the speakers’ bureau will be the one-stop shop for conference, event, and panel organizers to find speakers bringing a diversity of experience and thought to the table, and, in turn, spark innovation and new insights,” SAGE Founder Julie Kuchepatov said.
As the industry continues to face disruptions and recuperate from the Covid-19 pandemic, Kuchepatov emphasized the importance of centering diverse voices, to share new and innovative solutions.
Also coinciding with International Womens Day, Sweden-based international research center Nordregio announced an initiative, Laks og Ligestilling (Salmon and Equality in English), promoting gender equality in the seafood industry.
The Stockholm, Sweden-based research institute launched the initiative to identify analyze what hinders or promotes gender inequality across fisheries and aquaculture in the Nordic region.
Nordregio said it will aim to provide a “more-balanced representation of both males and females. Also to generate an overview of existing statistics on gender ration among employees and employers in the fisheries and aquaculture sector and to identify gaps across division of labor and strata within the sector,” it said in a press release.
Photo courtesy of Julie Kuchepatov/LinkedIn
