Leah Sweet: Weathering the gender bias storm

Imagine working in an environment where you face discrimination constantly, people talk down to you, your abilities are underestimated, you are overlooked. Yet you love what you do and persist. Against that backdrop of the sailing industry, we meet Leah Sweet, a professional sailor.

While the corporate world has made inroads on diversity and inclusion, the sailing industry has much more to do. In regattas, only about 16% of competitors are women. Though many young girls take part in junior sailing, there is a high drop-out rate as they get older. The women who stay must work hard to build confidence and earn respect.

Very early in her career, Leah took a job on a superyacht with an all-male deck crew tasked with safety and engineering duties. It was so uncommon that there was no uniform for her; she had to wear men’s sizes, and found herself emulating her male colleagues. “You just have to try and find your femininity and keep it,” she laments, adding that even today some advertised jobs are indicated as not open to women.

Born to a sailing family, Leah was about six weeks old when her parents moved to the Azores, off the coast of Portugal. “It was an incredible place to grow up. I was surrounded by the ocean and intimately in touch with nature,” recalls Leah, who lived there until she was 18. Her parents owned a yacht repair shop, and her summers were spent learning the ropes that fed her passion for a sailing career.

When I am out in the ocean, I feel totally liberated. Nothing else matters. There could be shooting stars above you and dolphins swimming next to the boat.

A magna cum laude English graduate, Leah trained to be a teacher but set to sea first, working on tall ships. “We were once out for 40 days sailing between South America and South Africa. This is where I learned hard work and developed my work ethic, but I made peanuts.” She then got a license to work on superyachts, where the pay was better but the environment male-dominated. “You realise that what you are doing is washing a billionaire’s toy,” she states.

Then she discovered racing, and with it, more meaning and a bigger purpose. The work is performance- and technology-oriented, the pace of innovation relentless. And sailing is a rare sport where men and women can compete together on a theoretically level playing field.

Where the wind blows

Leah, who lives in Brittany, moved from Barcelona in 2024 to become captain of the IMOCA TeamWork, Team SNEF, preparing Swiss skipper Justine Mettraux to race in the Vendée Globe, the non-stop, single-handed round-the-world race that is the Holy Grail for solo sailors. “It is probably one of the riskiest things I have done,” she reflects.

“On the worst day at sea, everything on that boat at that moment is your world,” Leah shares. “You are put in life-or-death situations which teach you how to work with your team so closely. There’s no time for gender or race differences, everyone is working together, because if we don’t, we can all be in danger.”

Sea of change

Sailing is a masculine, misogynistic world, and that compelled Leah to advocate strongly for women in the sport. She is an active member of The Magenta Project, a sustainable network founded in 2015 to bring more equity and inclusion to sailing. “In this industry, leaders don’t have leadership training. Leaders merely emulate how they were treated before,” she reflects. To counter that, The Magenta Project believes in appointing more female leaders.

Leah signed up for the project’s mentoring in 2019 and became Mentoring Lead from 2022–24, helping shape a programme that accepts 30–35 mentees a year. It was while running it that she received a series of training sessions from Women of the World coaching, enrolled together with six women in leadership roles at The Magenta Project. “It was a great opportunity to reflect and share stories about the battles and barriers we were trying to fight. We learned different tools that could be applied to our struggles.”

She has since taken on a new role as Foiling Pathway Lead, foiling being a watersport that lifts a boat above the water so it essentially flies. It’s an attractive new platform for women, requiring less physical strength than traditional sailing, and the Magenta Foiling Team runs introductory clinics around the world. “It is a wonderful platform where we can create a good female talent pool,” she says.

Maintaining a steady course

“I am happy to be part of a generation where lifting weights for women is normal,” says Leah. “When I was growing up I ran track and my legs were very strong, and I was made fun of because I wasn’t petite. Now, being strong is a superpower, something this generation is proud of, and I love that.”

“It was a big risk to choose this career. In a way, it chose me. You learn as you go, you battle the culture and antiquated system.” She remains grateful, for her partner, also a sailing professional and her biggest supporter, and for a career full of learning. “We have a saying in sailing that the worst day on the ocean is still better than the worst day in the office.”