Safety at Sea Is Not Gender-Neutral: A Study on Human-Factors, Protective-Equipment-Anthropometry, Occupational-Safety and Well-Being Gaps for Women Seafarers

Personal protective equipment, workspaces and safety systems are engineered around assumptions about the bodies and behaviour of their users. In the maritime workforce those assumptions have historically been male: women make up fewer than two per cent of the world’s 1.9 million seafarers, and the shipboard environment they work in, including its protective equipment, machinery, accommodation and emergency systems, was overwhelmingly designed for a male population. This paper treats the resulting disadvantages as an applied human-factors and occupational-safety problem, asking how a male-default design baseline translates into measurable safety, health and equipment gaps, and how engineering methods can close them. Following the PRISMA 2020 guideline, we searched Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed, screened 516 records, and synthesised 50 sources. Five engineering-relevant clusters emerged: (i) protective equipment sized to male anthropometry; (ii) workspace and accommodation design that embeds gendered reach, force and privacy penalties; (iii) a high and persistent burden of harassment, bullying and sexual misconduct, with reported prevalence exceeding 50 per cent among women; (iv) under-addressed occupational and reproductive-health exposures; and (v) weak, non-anonymous reporting and redress systems. Across clusters the evidence is dominated by qualitative and survey research with heterogeneous, non-standardised definitions and almost no engineering-grade quantification of risk. We argue that several of these gaps are tractable design problems, namely anthropometry-driven protective-equipment specification, inclusive ergonomic standards in equipment and safety-system design, and tamper-evident digital reporting tools, and we set out a structured, engineering-oriented research agenda. Framed as an applied human-factors and safety-engineering question rather than solely a policy concern, accommodating the full user population emerges as a precondition for a safe, inclusive and resilient workforce.