Evaluation of Gender Equality Criteria Related to Social Sustainability in Ports

Abstract

Ports are developing sustainability frameworks in order to cope with latest requirements from the stakeholders. Economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability are the three pillars of the topic. Although economic and environmental aspects of sustainability in ports are widely researched in the literature, the social dimension of gender equality research is scarce. To fill the gap, it is important to identify the most important efforts for improving gender equality in ports. The aim of this study is to evaluate the gender equality criterias by port executives in terms of social sustainability. For this purpose, one of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) was used to evaluate the priority weights of five criterias in Turkey. The results show that recruitment policy is the most important criteria in the field. Therefore, some suggestions are made to port industry to become more socially sustainable by minimizing the gender gap.