Leadership diversity affects the bottom line
Women currently represent 70% of the hospitality industry’s workforce (Baum, 2015). Yet, by the end of 2020, only 17% of business leaders at the executive level were women and only 6% of CEOs were women (European Women on Boards, 2020). Leadership diversity matters because it affects the bottom line.
A recent study revealed that companies with over 30% women on their executive teams are significantly more likely to outperform those with 10-30% women. In turn, companies with at least a few women are more likely to outperform those companies with fewer or no female executives at all (McKinsey, 2020). This is not groundbreaking news. In fact, study after study has shown the positive results of gender diversity in leadership roles on work outcomes. However, change has been excruciatingly slow. So, what is holding us back?
Men and women see things differently
In a quest to figure this out, we embarked on a journey to understand the perceptions of managers in what hinders women from advancing to executive positions in the European hospitality industry. Our sample consisted of 107 hospitality professionals with an average age of 41 from which 52% were female, 83% had at least a bachelor’s degree, 43% were married, and 44% had children. In addition, 52% held a general management position, 59% held top management roles, and 45% worked for a company with 50-249 employees (and 35% with over 250 employees).
We provided a list of 10 well-known factors backed up by research that hinder women’s career advancement (see figure 1). We found gender differences in all the factors except one! Women rated all nine factors substantially more as barriers than men. For example, while both women and men rated stereotyping and preconceptions as impeding women’s career advancement, this was substantially greater for women than men. Interestingly, the only barrier that was not subject to gender differences was the “lack of significant general management or line experience”.
We also found significant gender differences on men’s attitude towards professional women. Men disagreed and women agreed to the statement “male managers are often intimidated by/have difficulty managing women”. Likewise, men disagreed and women were neutral to the statement “men have difficulty being supervised by women.”