March 8th is International Women's Day, and at Divo Yacht we take it as an opportunity to recognise the women who continue to shape the yachting industry - from captains and chief engineers to naval architects, interior designers, yacht owners and members of our own team. Yachting is a small industry by global standards, but it is one where the contribution of women has quietly changed almost every part of how yachts are designed, built, run and enjoyed.
Women who shape yachting
The visible change over the past decade has been at sea. Female captains now command a growing share of the world's superyachts, and women fill senior roles across deck, engineering, interior and purser departments. Less visible but equally important is the work of women in design and naval architecture: interior studios with female lead designers are behind some of the most distinctive new builds of recent years, and a generation of women in yard management is reshaping how projects are delivered. Sustainability, provenance of materials and the human experience on board - increasingly central to how yachts are specified - are areas where women in the industry have led the conversation.
Our team
At Divo Yacht, our work only happens because of the women on our team: brokerage colleagues, translators, crew-support coordinators, marketing and account managers. Every client relationship we build runs through the work they do in the background - often invisible in the yard or at the dock, but without it nothing else moves. Whether you visit us in Imperia or Ventimiglia, the first person you meet, the voice on the other end of a phone call, and the colleague translating between a buyer and an Italian yard are very often the women who hold the agency together.
Working with women owners and captains
We also work directly with women on the other side of the table: women owners buying or selling yachts in their own right, and women captains representing their principals through the brokerage or refit process. These are relationships we value because they are often clear-eyed and practical: experienced women owners and captains tend to know exactly what matters on a yacht, what does not, and how they want a process to run. Our job is to match that directness.
Beyond March 8th
International Women's Day is a reminder, not a one-day project. Many of the women who have shaped yachting did so before it was fashionable to notice, and today's progress rests on that foundation. The more useful question is what happens for the next year - in mentoring, in hiring, in who gets promoted, in how the industry talks about itself. Our commitment is to carry the same recognition into every day of the working calendar, because the future of yachting is, transparently, a future in which women's leadership is no longer a headline. In the meantime, you can follow along with our team and the yachts we represent on the About Divo Yacht page and across our current brokerage fleet.