Anyone direct me to a source where I might find out how many women unlimited masters there currently are working or have been licensed?
Try these ladies.
http://www.womensmaritimeassoc.com/intropage.html
And they are not just deckies you know …
I was at the Women on the Water conference at Texas A & M in Galveston Nov 4-6. I was very surprised at the number of women unlimited masters there (and also a couple of unlimited chief engineers there). I don;t know any specific numbers but I do know there are a heck of a lot more of them than when I started (there were zero then)! I was glad to hear of the increas in attendence at the conference. They said at the 1st one they only had about 50 total and this year there were over 50 cadets alone and somewhere around 200 total. I wonder if the Coast Guard keeps statistics on who has a license by gender? They probably do have information on how many unlimited licenses are out there…
Submit a Freedom of Information request at Coast Guard NMC via Headquarters. They may charge you alittle money (maybe not because it would be a simple query) and they should help you. Go to www.uscg.mil and search on their site. Good luck, I am interested in seeing the stats too.
[QUOTE=BMCSRetired;43986]Submit a Freedom of Information request at Coast Guard NMC via Headquarters. They may charge you alittle money (maybe not because it would be a simple query) and they should help you. Go to www.uscg.mil and search on their site. Good luck, I am interested in seeing the stats too.[/QUOTE]
Save yourself the trouble. We don’t keep data on a mariner’s gender. Perhaps this is because it’s irrelevant to a mariner’s qualifications, or maybe it’s becausde our record-keeping hasn’t changed from when there were extremely few, if any, women working as mariners. In any event, we don’t have it easily available. Yes, we could do an extremely tedious and labor intensive manual count, but FOIA only requires disclsosure of records that are kept, it doesn’t require answering interrogatories or assembling data that is not normally kept. By the way, MARAD has a complete copy of the data kept in the Coast Guard’s mariner database.
[QUOTE=jdcavo;43989]Save yourself the trouble. We don’t keep data on a mariner’s gender. Perhaps this is because it’s irrelevant to a mariner’s qualifications, or maybe it’s becausde our record-keeping hasn’t changed from when there were extremely few, if any, women working as mariners. In any event, we don’t have it easily available. Yes, we could do an extremely tedious and labor intensive manual count, but FOIA only requires disclsosure of records that are kept, it doesn’t require answering interrogatories or assembling data that is not normally kept. By the way, MARAD has a complete copy of the data kept in the Coast Guard’s mariner database.[/QUOTE]
Sorry, I figured since the USCG had moved everything to one place and was singing the praises of NMC, I would have thought that automation of the database would have been a priority to implement savings and promote efficiency.
BTW, there are a couple of Admirals that maybe looking for that information on an unrelated matter…
Thanks all for your reply s. My daughter will not be totally surrounded by men when she starts sailing. As Tina Fey said last night on being 3rd woman to recieve the Mark Twain comedy award: “will be good when women are so integrated into everything that we stop counting.”
[QUOTE=BMCSRetired;44019]Sorry, I figured since the USCG had moved everything to one place and was singing the praises of NMC, I would have thought that automation of the database would have been a priority to implement savings and promote efficiency.
BTW, there are a couple of Admirals that maybe looking for that information on an unrelated matter…[/QUOTE]
Tghe only information they have electronically and readily available for query is what is noted on your MMC or ther old license and MMD. Gender isn’t reported on those documents, so it’s not data that can be easily queried for the mariner population as a whole. That’s not to say we don’t have it, it’s just not something easily available, and thus is beyond the scope of what we’d have to provide under FOIA.