Gender (in)equality in the Events, Tourism and Hospitality sectors

The Approach

Mentoring for gender equality: Supporting female leaders in the hospitality industry

The hospitality industry struggles with staff motivation, commitment and retention, whilst also having an entrenched glass ceiling that limits career opportunities for many women. Mentoring is a useful function to support and develop staff, and may be particularly important for helping women overcome gendered barriers to progression. This paper reports on a year-long qualitative study of a women’s mentoring programme in the UK hospitality industry. Drawing on data from 71 interviews with a sample of 13 mentors and 14 mentees, the findings illustrate the persistent gendered obstacles women experience as they try and negotiate careers in masculinist hospitality organisations. The mentoring programme offers individual support for the mentees, and also begins to challenge gendered discourses of success in hospitality careers, illustrating that mentoring has an important role to play in both career development and in confronting gender inequality in the hospitality industry.

Accessibility, diversity and inclusion in the UK meetings industry

Issues of accessibility, diversity and inclusion are becoming increasingly important for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) managers around the globe and need to be considered in terms of both event attendees and employees / meetings professionals. The UK MICE sector is facing an unprecedented period of disruption in relation to the recent Covid-19 pandemic and the uncertainty of Brexit, the impacts of which may have far-reaching consequences in terms of equality and diversity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 stakeholders – meeting planners, venue managers, entrepreneurs and member organisation leaders – this paper considers how issues of accessibility, diversity and inclusion are playing out in the changing landscape of the UK meetings industry. Findings suggest that although the MICE sector is paying increasing attention to the importance of accessibility, there is evidence of persistent inequality and marginalisation on the grounds of gender, age, ‘race’ and (dis)ability. We question if a focus on diversity remains a priority in economically, politically and socially unsettled times, and what this may mean for an inclusive future for the UK meetings industry.

Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women-only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women’s career success and progression, but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women-only mentoring programme, built on gender-positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this article considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organisational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged.

Gender matters

This article is a review paper, which examines the place of gender in hospitality research and education and discusses the significance of hospitality for women’s employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. The paper’s main purpose, however, is to speculate on the future of hospitality gender research and women’s employment prospects in the industry. It suggests that, despite the emergence of gender perspectives in hospitality research and the recent rise of popular feminism in response to high-profile sexual harassment cases and a well-publicised gender pay gap, gender still does not occupy mainstream territory in the field. The paper stresses the continued missed opportunities of neglecting female talent and calls on female and male leaders to shape a gender-just future in hospitality study and practice by mentoring and holding hierarchies to account. The paper identifies AI and robotics, and sexual exploitation and harassment as two areas in which hospitality gender scholars could lead scholarship and policy debates on gendered human experiences.

Confident, focused and connected: The importance of mentoring for women’s career development in the events industry

The events industry is female-dominated numerically, yet men continue to occupy the majority of senior roles and positions of influence. A variety of factors contribute to this persistent glass ceiling, including shortage of female role models, lack of confidence, inflexible working hours and limited professional networks. Mentoring has been shown to begin to address some of these challenges women may face in progressing to senior positions. This paper reports on research conducted on a formal industry-wide mentoring programme for women that aims to pair female professionals with leading industry figures in a supportive, collaborative and focused programme of development activities. Drawing on data from 37 interviews with mentees on the programme, conducted over the course of one year, the article considers if and how mentoring can help empower women in the events industry to aim high and proactively advance their careers.

Findings suggest that mentoring can have positive effects on women’s confidence, ability to plan professionally and build supportive and enabling networks. The study shows the value of a structured, formal programme for mentoring activities and suggests that, although mentoring alone will not redress gender inequality in the events industry, it provides a valuable and effective mechanism for individual career development and empowerment.

A research agenda

This article is an opinion piece, which briefly reviews the ways in which tourism is a hugely important sector for women’s employment and entrepreneurship opportunities and ultimately for their life, leisure and business experiences. Its main purpose is to speculate on the future of tourism gender research and practice over the next decade. It suggests that, despite a maturing of the field, research utilising qualitative and feminist methods of inquiry continues to struggle for legitimacy in a field dominated by (post)scientific paradigms and approaches. The piece describes the role senior academics must play to shape a vibrant future for gender studies, through mentoring and by holding knowledge structures and hierarchies to account. The piece concludes by highlighting two areas in which tourism gender scholars could lead research on gendered human experiences in the next decade, namely AI and robotics, and sexual exploitation and harassment.

Gender, advertising and ethics

Online advertisements are representations of ethnographic knowledge and sites of cultural production, social interaction and individual experience. Based on a critical discourse analysis of an online Iberia Airlines advertisement and a series of blogs, this paper reveals how the myths and fantasies privileged within the discourses of the advertising and travel industries entwine to exoticise and eroticise Cuba. The paper analyses how constructions of Cuba are framed by its colonial past, merging the feminine and the exotic in a soft primitivism. Tourism is Cuba’s largest foreign exchange earner and a significant link between the island and the global capitalist system. These colonial descriptions of Cuba create a rhetoric of desire that entangles Cuba and its women in a discourse of beauty, conquest and domination, and have actual consequences for tourism workers and dream economies, in this case reinforcing the oppression of Afro-Cuban women by stereotyping and objectifying them.