ABSTRACT
This paper examines the relevance of gender with respect to the concept of maritime clusters. Though the concept of maritime clusters has gained popularity from a strategic economic development perspective in increasing overall efficiency of the industry through innovation, maritime clusters have hardly been discussed in relation to the empowerment of women in the maritime sector. Women’s participation in the maritime industry has been reported to be fairly limited in many parts of the world and both horizontal and vertical segregations can still be observed even today. This paper demonstrates a deficiency in the existing literature to acknowledge the role played by maritime women professionals to operationalise the concept of maritime clusters. As such to facilitate mainstreaming of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) 5 (gender equality) into national maritime plans, the Rapid Integrated Assessment (RIA) is used as a tool to examine women professionals’ contributions to maritime clusters. Four stages of RIA offer steps towards defining a roadmap for a country to implement the SDGs. Foreseeing the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 as well as emerging business models in the maritime industry, gender equality is an opportunity to go beyond business-as-usual and advance sustainable development in the maritime sector. The paper also refers to social costs faced by women professionals in the maritime sector from current literature and analyses the opportunities emanating from maritime clusters to reduce such social costs.