59° North Sailingvideo
Victoria Lowe // Magenta Project CEO
12 June 2025 · 55 min · 187 views
What this video covers
Victoria Lowe, the newly appointed CEO of the Magenta Project, describes the organisation's origins, structure, and goals in a conversation hosted by Nikki Henderson recorded at Lowe's home in Winchester. Lowe traces her entry into women's sailing initiatives to the 1993–94 Whitbread round-the-world race, where she worked for Heineken, the sponsor of the all-female team skippered by Dawn Riley.▶ 10:32 Subsequent all-female campaigns — Team EF and Team SCA — led directly to the Magenta Project's founding, which Lowe dates to a post-race meeting at the Genoa boat show where female sailors found themselves without jobs while male counterparts had already secured positions.▶ 11:10 Lowe authored a 2019 strategic review on women in sailing for the World Sailing Trust that identified a sharp dropout of girls from the sport around age 17.▶ 12:12 The Magenta Project runs an annual mentoring program that has placed roughly 200 women with mentors; each cohort pairs 35–40 mentees with both male and female mentors.▶ 22:31 The organisation's 11-person board includes five men.▶ 44:32 Lowe argues that children are not a career-limiting factor for women and that framing gender equity as a shared goal rather than an adversarial one is central to the project's approach.▶ 32:43 Donations and contact are available at themagentaproject.org.▶ 48:14 Andy Schell's introduction notes a Torqeedo outboard purchase for Axel's dinghy and a Swan 70 (a modified Swan 651) transatlantic delivery from Salvador, Brazil, to Gran Canaria departing around October 1st, with six crew places open.▶ 1:05
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