On 4 October at the Global Seafood Alliance (GOAL) conference in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., Seafood and Gender Equality (SAGE) Founder Julie Kuchepatov announced new the launch of a Gender Equity Dialogues program for the seafood industry.
SAGE, founded in 2020, is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., working to raise awareness of gender inequities and to improve gender equality in the seafood sector.
The Gender Equity Dialogues will take place in mid-2023 as part of a partnership with Women in the Seafood Industry (WSI), SAGE said in a press release. The program will be open to leaders in the seafood sector interested in addressing key barriers to gender equality across the seafood industry. Through the program, participants will learn about making measurable and actionable commitments and gaining tools to enact change to bring about gender equality industry-wide.
“We are very excited to launch the Gender Equality Dialogues, in partnership with WSI,” Kuchepatov said. “Not only are we gathering a group of seafood leaders into a collaboration, but SAGE and WSI are also collaborating pre-competitively to build the most-robust program as possible in order to eliminate redundancies and confusion in the sector. By uniting, we are showing that this is an important issue that we all must address collectively.”
The program is aimed towards people who want to address gender inequality throughout the seafood industry, WSI Managing Director Camille Cherques said.
“It is important to include from the onset every seafood stakeholder around the table to make the dialogues a two-way exchange, to understand better issues and to increase diversity, collective creativity, and innovation," Cherques said. "The idea for the Dialogues originated from the conclusions of a global survey conducted by WSI in 2018, which showed the gap of knowledge on the issues in the sector. We are very happy to partner with SAGE so that it becomes a tangible project, starting in North America.”
Photo courtesy of Bhavana Scalia-Bruce/SeafoodSource
