Beautiful destinations, lavish ships and incredible vacations usually make up the day-to-day cruise industry. But in that industry, women make up 18 to 20% of the workforce. That may seem like a high number, but it's still a long way to go. Of the more than 300 passenger cruise ships worldwide, fewer than a dozen have woman captains and it's still pretty rare to find women in the upper levels of the cruise industry, since they only account for 5.4% of officers.
But those statistics are changing thanks to Belinda Bennett, the world's first black woman cruise ship captain. Bennett has worked for the small ship line Windstar Cruises for 14 years and sails the MSY Wind Star through the Caribbean in winter and Europe in summer. She recently won the U.K.'s prestigious Merchant Navy Medal for Meritorious Service. With International Women's Day and Women's History month just around the corner, we caught up with this trailblazing woman who is making history and helping create a sea change in her industry.
"I originally came from a small island called St. Helena, which is in the South Atlantic Ocean between South America and South Africa," explains Bennett to Forbes.com. "[It's] smack bang in the middle of the Atlantic, miles from anywhere. Growing up on a small island, from the age that I could walk I was in the water. I loved the ocean. It used to be that the only way off the island was by ship. So when I was 17, I took a job on the RMS St. Helena, the ship that supported the island. That’s when my adventures started."
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"Unfortunately, I had a rough start," continues Bennett. "When I was training as a cadet, I sailed with...
... chief officers who made me work harder than the other guys. During your cadetship you're starting out as a sailor, so you do every job that they do. I had a chief officer, unfortunately, who made me work later than the sailors, so they would knock off for the day, and I would be left outside continuing to work until it got dark. It really was a make-or-break-you time, and me being me, I refused to be broken."
Every ship has a captain, but on larger percentage on the ships in the cruise industry captains are of the male gender. It has been the truth as old as time, men overpopulate the majority of the higher paying positions around the world and this positions has not been any different for as long as the cruise industry has existed. It seems that this old-fashioned way of thinking has wasn't ready for Bennett--well, not at first.
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"After working on a private yacht off of Monaco for over two years, I did a stint on the Isle of Man Steam Packet ferries. Then I went back to school for my masters. After that, I tried to go back into yachts, but I was unsuccessful. The yachting industry wasn’t quite ready for me at that time. I remember being sat down by an agent in Antibes and being told that finding a job in the yachting industry would be very hard because of three things: 1) I had a higher education than most captains at the time; 2) I was a woman; 3) I was black. So I had to reevaluate my options, and Windstar, here I came. I got a job with Windstar Cruises in 2005."
Becoming a captain aboard one cruise ship does not happen overnight, it takes years of commitment towards one or several companies and experience. That's why its so important to congratulate Bennett. The acknowledgment that a woman can work as hard and sacrifice as much as one man aboard a cruise ship is a step forward to breaking away from those old-fashioned stereotypes which have been lingering throughout the history of the cruise ship industry.
