Building towards balance
Last year we reported on how The Magenta Project utilised the €14,250 donated from the entry fees of the 2023 DAME Design Awards to enhance its mentoring activities. Since then, this global charity has continued to broaden the reach and scope of its equity and inclusion for women in sailing programme and appointed its first CEO, Victoria Low as an enabler to accelerate progress.
It's 10 years since the women of Team SCA, having finished sixth in the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race, were chatting in a race equipment container on the quay at Genoa about what to do next. Victoria Low was Team SCA’s Communications Director at the time and remembers that the male sailors in the other VOR yachts all had their next jobs lined up but there was no obvious roadmap for the women. The team had built a significant (for the day) social media following of more than 200,000 as they raced around the world, but there was no obvious next step.
“We felt we owed them something and we were all quite frustrated,” Victoria recalls, “so The Magenta Project grew out of that discussion.”
The initial focus was on creating more opportunities for women in competitive sailing. Initiatives included Team Magenta 2016-17 M32 World Match Racing Tour – the first all-female entry in that series; Thalassa Magenta Racing and an all-female GC32 sailing team in the 2016 Extreme Sailing Series. Race campaign clinics were also held. However, it was clear this kind of activity would fulfil the ambition of only a very small group of people.
The Magenta Project had greater ambitions and went on to develop a vehicle to promote the prospects of women more widely across sailing and boating. Its mentoring programme to-date has provided impactful to support to more than 250 mentees from around the world. The programme has been responsible for measurable improvement on the careers of participants and has retained 90 per cent of its valuable team of highly experienced female and male mentors over its years of operation.
Broadening the approach
Despite the valuable exposure that top women competitive sailors can bring to the cause of equity and inclusion, Victoria emphasises that the scope for The Magenta Project is now much wider.
“When the World Sailing Trust undertook its strategic review of Women in Sailing, the most used words in 5500 responses were opportunity and lack of opportunity. We offer five pathways now in mentoring, with more to be added. The current ones include Foiling, Offshore, Inshore and Management and Media. But although the sporting side is important, we’re also addressing a major missing part of how to get women into the wider marine industry through our STEM pathway.
“The marine industry offers a great range of opportunities, and its superpower is its flexibility. Because it is flexible, it can be innovative and trying to get greater diversity within the marine workforce is one of our renewed impetuses. We want women to enter the workforce, remain there and become leaders in five to 10 years’ time."
Among its immediate priorities, The Magenta Project is looking for more volunteers to become STEM mentors. It plans to split its Management and Media pathway to create a dedicated leadership programme, and it wants to create a pathway for race management and coaching to help redress gender balance in that area of the sport.
Cross organisation working is key
Longer term, Victoria sees the need for collaborative working as a top priority, not just for The Magenta Project but across the whole industry:
“There are some incredible initiatives around diversity and inclusion in our sport, but a lot of that is siloed and not working together. This is not about trying to create an Instagram post – we need to create a movement. Until all the individual organisations in this space work better together, we’re not going to make that impact. The Magenta Project wants to work across companies, organisations, teams and events on our overarching mission of increasing inclusivity and diversity within the whole sport and marine industry, leading on gender.”
Having created its base tool set and considerable experience in mentoring programmes now, The Magenta Project wants to adapt its approach to work with other organisations. As an example it has launched a female leadership development programme with IMOCA. This offers three pathways – skipper, team manager and technical director. A team will select one of those pathways, then take a mentee into the team for a six-month programme. The end game objective being to facilitate an equal male/female balance across the racing fleet in those roles.
One of the first beneficiaries of the scheme is round the world yachtswoman and social media star Cole Brauer. She is joining Team Malizia on The Ocean Race as co-skipper, alongside her pre-existing mentor from The Magenta Project, Boris Herrmann.
Industry wide project to enhance opportunities
The Magenta Project also has a project in development targeted to enhance the opportunities for women in the broader industry called Maritime Shift. Victoria emphasises this is not an attempt to create an artificially skewed platform as a means of numerically addressing gender bias:
“Our focus is on getting talented, capable, good women into the industry, not about making quotas. We want to open the opportunities that exist in this incredible industry that we've all work in and ensure they are open to anyone who has the right skill sets.”
In the months ahead The Magenta Project will be looking for businesses seeking assistance with delivering their own equity and inclusion objectives for women in the marine industry. Work will include identifying, placing and mentoring talented females and on issues around how to support and retain women in the workforce.
Speaking about existing barriers to entry, Victoria says it can be a challenge to find exactly where the opportunities exist. Despite visible recruitment activity on platforms like LinkedIn, many opportunities can stay unknown when people fill vacancies through head hunting within their personal networks. She also highlights how proven research informs about the different psychological approaches of genders to any given job proposal. A male may well look at a role description, say I can do that one part of it and think he can do the whole role and apply. A female will look at the same job description, know she can do all of it except one part and think she cannot apply.
“None of this is about pandering to women,” Victoria is quick to qualify. “It’s about being equitable and developing a powerful balanced workforce. If businesses are driven by data, they will see an analytical reason for taking these steps as opposed to an emotional one, which is why research is also important.”
New research
It’s been six years now since the World Sailing Trust’s Women in Sailing Strategic review was released. Seeking fresh perspectives on its pre-pandemic findings, The Magenta Project is currently working on its 2X25 Strategic Review. Attracting the the widest possible range of views from people of all genders is essential for its success and the survey is still open until the end of September 2025.
Backed by 11th Hour Racing and supported by World Sailing, the 2X25 Strategic Review will examine progress on the nine recommendations from the 2019 Women in Sailing report and go beyond to gather findings on ableism, racism and ageism in the sport of sailing.
The Magenta Project is also running an Equal Pay Equal Play project based on 2023 data and research carried out by Dr Rachel Scarfe of the University of Stirling in 2024 on the gender pay gap in professional sailing.
The Magenta Project at Metstrade 2025
Information from this latest research is expected to be released at Metstrade 2025. The Magenta Project also anticipates launching its Maritime Shift programme at the show and collaborating with Metstrade’s Young Professionals Club. Look out for further details in coming weeks.
To read more about The Magenta Project visit https://themagentaproject.org. To learn how The Magenta Project can help with your own equity and inclusivity objectives, or to volunteer to assist the charity’s projects contact victoria@themagentaproject.org
