P&H coverage analysis 2023

Another set of Ports & Harbors (P&H) magazines for the year is done and I have therefore looked back at those past six editions to evaluate them for their diversity in terms of gender balance, regional coverage, as well as IAPH focus areas.

Authors and interviewees by gender per edition

One of the findings of the 2022 diversity analysis was that we needed to improve our male to female interviewee ratio towards having more female voices in the magazine.

I am happy to report that this year, we have indeed featured more female experts in the magazine. While in 2022, the split was 75/25% for male and female interviewees, in 2023, the split was 50/50% - a great success.

We were also again able to balance the number of male and female cover interviewees as in past years, which contributes to raising awareness of the excellent women experts we have in the maritime industry but also along the further transport supply chain.

It also seems my advice to contributors to seek more female voices in their articles has worked.

Regional coverage

The IAPH consists of six regions and within our coverage, we try to publish articles that speak to each of them.

In the past, Europe has been the dominant region - in terms of where interviewees come from but also content-wise. This is still the case, however, over the past three years, we have been conscious to publish more articles that cover global ports.

While Europe is still the dominant region in our coverage, all other five regions have been featured nearly equally.

We do need to pay more attention to the regional spread of the cover interviewees. While in the past nearly all regions were featured, this year, five cover interviewees are based in Europe and only one in North America.

IAPH focus areas

The IAPH has three focus areas pertaining to climate and energy, data collaboration, and risk and resilience. I tagged the majority of articles within P&H in 2023 with risk and resilience.

This mirrors the constant state of crisis: pandemic, supply chain crisis, Ukraine/Russia war and shows an awareness that ports have to deal with those challenges.

At the same time, risk and resilience also covers projects that deal with climate and energy as well as digitalisation in the name of preparing ports to set up operations that can cope with a changing climate and fuel landscape as well as new regulations around digital port operations - such as the incoming IMO regulation on electronic maritime single windows.