Breaking barriers and bridging the gap
International ‘Women’s Day’ (IWD) was celebrated on 8th March 2026. The day marked a call to action for accelerating gender equality. But that acceleration is painfully slow, given that IWD has been around for over a hundred years. The sad truth is that many International Women’s Day events can feel like lip service.
Take the hospitality industry for example: Although the industry has long been recognized for being diverse and inclusive in nature, there’s still work to be done when it comes to empowering women in leadership positions. Women are still not reaching mid-and top-level leadership positions at the same rate as men, despite females making up 51.2% of the workforce in the hospitality sector.
This disproportion is largely driven by occupational segregation, where men hold a greater share of high-paying leadership positions, while women are over-represented in lower-wage roles such as frontline service jobs, etc. (Hilton ESG Report). Women are also more likely to work part-time or in flexible roles due to care giving responsibilities, which can limit opportunities for promotion or salary increases. Many working mothers are faced with the impossible trade-off of balancing full-time work with full-time mothering – illustrating one of many struggles females face in attaining managerial and executive roles. It’s no wonder that many women feel like they don’t belong in the workplace.
A cursory glance might suggest that it is a “women are everywhere” industry, and in many functions they are – such as in front of the house areas including Housekeeping, Human Resources, Public Relations, Finance or Administration and to a lesser degree in Food & Beverages service. Amazingly, it is far less in the food world – or at least in my corner of it. For generations, cooking has been predominantly a women’s realm, and the knowledge and wisdom that sustained humanity has been passed through the female line. So the culinary world is one of the few in the professional sphere where women have an edge. And yet our hotel kitchens remain overly dominated by men.
For hotels, large and small scale, it is not just about recruiting more women and gender diverse employees. It also means creating a workplace culture that truly embraces diversity and provides opportunities for growth. This is not a pipeline problem; it’s a structural one – which very few industry leaders have been bold enough to reset.
A hotel in Sri Lanka, where I live, received the ‘Gender Equality Champion of the Year’ award at ITB Berlin, earlier this month. In the Accommodation category, the winner was the Amba Yaalu Kandalama resort, which is not only run by an all-female staff—from top management to maintenance, but also takes the supply chain into account, for example by giving preference to female farmers as suppliers.
In 2017, my son Ashraaq who had gone on a holiday with his wife to Botswana spoke about how impressed he was with what the Chobe Game Lodge had achieved, by providing an exciting equal opportunity initiative for women. The Safari Lodge, positioned on the banks of the Chobe River, had not only implemented, (as part of their Responsible Tourism strategy), the continent’s first fleet of solar powered safari boats and vehicles, but was also a beacon of female empowerment. This is where Botswana’s first all-women guiding team, the Chobe Angels, (now a full team of 16 female guides) was born in a male dominated guiding fraternity in that country.
The above are two examples of a few initiatives that made the headlines. Looking ahead though, Gender equality in the hospitality should not merely be a headline but a non-negotiable baseline.
Mehroon Wahab – Is Director Sales / Admin for Hospitality Sri Lanka. The writer, a former Media representative for ‘Spa Asia’ in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, is a professional Jazz Pianist and Composer. Her originals can be viewed online including on Spotify. She is an avid birder and wild life photographer, and a qualified TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) instructor.
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