Dive Brief:

• Women’s representation in hospitality leadership roles continued to increase last year, according to a newly released report conducted by Penn State’s School of Hospitality Management on behalf of the AHLA Foundation, the charitable arm of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. 
• Women now hold one in four chief-level leadership roles at hotel companies and are equally represented alongside men at the director level, the report found.
• Though progress has been made, women still face barriers, and the lack of representation increases as women hospitality leaders move up in an organization’s hierarchy.

Dive Insight:

The AHLA Foundation’s annual Women in Hospitality report found that representation for women leaders in hospitality continued to incrementally increase in 2022, and women and men are now equally represented at the director level. 

Most benchmarks featured in the report showed progress for women hospitality leaders. For instance, the report said, women have seen “significant” gains in the investment and development fields since 2019. Women also held 24% of podium spots at hotel investment conferences in 2022, up from 16% in 2017. 

Disparities in representation increase as women climb the corporate ladder. Though women gained “a small amount” at the CEO and president levels, when it comes to the C-suite, there are 4.2 men for every woman. At the partner and principal level, there are still 11.4 men for every woman — though that’s an improvement over 2019, when the ratio was 15.3 to one. 

While the representation of women in chief positions has increased, roles for women most often tend to be in HR or sales and marketing. And the gains women have made in investment and development fields at the director level aren’t reflected in the C-suite — there are now 27.5 men in CIO and CDO positions for every woman CIO or CDO. 

According to McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace report, women in leadership face challenges in almost every industry. In 2022, McKinsey found, women leaders were choosing to leave their companies at the highest rate in years, further exacerbating the gender gap in corporate leadership. These women leaders cited feeling overworked and under-recognized, and experienced more difficulty getting promoted than their male colleagues.

Similar to the AHLA Foundation’s findings, McKinsey found that nationally, one in four C-suite leaders is a woman, though women continue to make slow, consistent gains in leadership representation. 

“We want to see equity for women at the leadership level and across the hotel industry, and this progress is encouraging,” said AHLA Foundation President Anna Blue in a statement of the Woman in Hospitality report. “Representation is only the first step. We see growing efforts by our members to prioritize intersectional leadership, inclusion, and belonging for women in the industry.”

To that end, AHLA and the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International Americas recently partnered to promote diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and address workforce challenges across the industry. The organizations will connect their membership bases to jointly hold events and campaigns. 

The sixth annual report was based on data collected from over 700 hotel companies’ websites as well as attendance rosters from the four largest annual hotel investment conferences in the U.S.