An IMOCA initiative designed to increase female participation in the marine and ocean racing industries is expanding this year and setting ambitious goals for the cycle up to the next Vendée Globe in 2028.
The Female Leadership Development Programme (FLDP), a collaboration between IMOCA and The Magenta Project, which is supported by 11th Hour Racing, was launched in May 2024 with the aim of increasing diversity and inclusion in the sailing industry.
During its successful first year, the initiative created a mentoring programme under which four women were mentored by IMOCA team managers or skippers in four different teams, among them the American sailor Cole Brauer who was mentored by the Team Malizia skipper Boris Herrmann.
Those pioneering placements lasted four weeks. This season, the FLDP is scaling up, aiming to involve a quarter of the IMOCA teams, with women taking on key roles as skippers, team managers, boat captains or technical directors.
Over the next three years the goal is to expand further, with up to 10 teams involved next year and even more by 2027. There is also a new initiative which will be launched next year to link the FLDP with local industries in Brittany and create a pathway that women can use to join the marine industry.
Imogen Dinham-Price, Partnerships and Sustainability Manager at IMOCA who is helping to drive the collaboration with The Magenta Project forward, explained the background. “We wanted to create a mentoring programme alongside The Magenta Project whereby women with experience could come into an IMOCA team and follow either a skipper, a boat captain, technical director or team manager and learn from them so that they can then take on these roles in the future,” she said.“These leadership roles and pathways were lacking females and what we wanted to do was create a programme which encourages women – women who have relevant experience in other sectors – to come into these roles and remain in them,” Dinham-Price added.
Lena Weisskichel is the mentoring lead at The Magenta Project, an award-winning global charity established in 2015 dedicated to ensuring greater equity and inclusion for women in the ocean racing and marine industries. Weisskichel is responsible for identifying suitable women for the programme, working with the IMOCA teams on the scheme and organising the curriculum for the new six-month placements.
“Working across the whole sailing industry, we are trying to get mentees from all over the world, and recently we have made a big effort to attract women from Asia,” she explained.“Our long term goal, which is very ambitious, is to have a mentee in all of the IMOCA teams. So with our current timeline, until the next Vendée Globe, we would like up to 75% of the IMOCA teams to have enrolled in the programme by 2028.”
Weisskichel says long term employment for more women in the IMOCA Class will be one of the yardsticks of success for the programme. “Mentees getting full time jobs in the role that they have been mentored in is obviously the main end goal,” she said. “The FLDP gives mentees the opportunity to get in contact with the teams. It gives them an opportunity to prove themselves, make themselves visible and noticeable to the teams and also – because this is a female leadership programme – we are trying to educate people on leadership principles. Trying to educate the teams on leadership, and what female leadership could look like, and making them more open and more aware of accepting female leaders in the industry.”
For Cole Brauer who, in 2024 became the first American woman to sail non-stop unassisted around the world in a race, the FLDP has been the perfect bridge enabling her to move from her own sailing campaign into IMOCA. After working as a mentee with Boris Herrmann, she has now been taken on by the team and is racing this season with Malizia in The Ocean Race Europe.
“I was the first placement by The Magenta Project under the scheme,” said Brauer, 31, who is originally from Connecticut in the United States. “And eventually people started saying ‘if we can do this with one person, why can’t we do it with a bunch of other women?’ So I was kind of the start of the programme.”
Brauer likes the fact that women engaged by teams under the scheme are paid. “Normally when you get into a leadership programme, it is an internship and that is the thing that makes me want to promote this one more and more, because it’s not just using up free labour – we’re actually able to use our skills and make a living in this industry,” she said.
Brauer hopes the scheme will have a positive trickle down effect helping women to find work in other classes and throughout the marine and sailing worlds and she fully supports what IMOCA and The Magenta Project are doing in this area. “I think the IMOCA fleet, unlike a lot of other fleets, is actually really trying to move this needle forward on having women involved in the pro-racing circuit. If you look at Team Malizia in The Ocean Race Europe, it is quite clear to see that we will always have two women on board of the four people racing on the boat. When The Magenta Project first started, the reason they were doing it was because it was so tricky for women to move forward in this industry. I think we are getting better, but this programme we are putting in place makes everything significantly easier for women to move forward.”
The American sailor believes the FLDP is a modest and practical response to an entrenched problem.
“Personally,” she added, “I enjoy having more women around because I think it adds a different perspective that maybe hasn’t been on the racecourse before and that perspective is super-valid and it’s necessary for winning.”
Overall, women in technical roles in IMOCA teams have always been under 10% of the total workforce which is why the FLDP is hoping to target roles in that area in the years ahead. But there are positive signs in other categories. The recent Course des Caps round Britain and Ireland race, for example, saw the highest proportion of female participants for an IMOCA race, with 15 (34%) women among the 44 sailors taking part. And in the team manager role, 2024 saw a 50-50 split between men and women in 2024 for the first time with women now at 63% in the current season.
Dinham-Price says one goal for the FLDP is to make sure this positive trend does not go into reverse. “We want to try and retain these women in these positions,” she said. “Women are prospering in the team manager role and we need to be able to maintain that level of participation and maintain the fact that there is a 50-50 split or even more in the years ahead.”
Ed Gorman
