Industry Insight: Gender Diversity – a Practical Guide

By Sharon Glancy, founder of Women 1st, the thought leadership, training and mentoring programme for the UK’s hospitality, passenger transport, travel and tourism industries

 The hospitality and tourism industry is one of the greatest contributors to the UK’s economy. In fact it is one of the UK’s most valuable and dynamic business sectors and women make up more than half the workforce yet they still find it hard to secure senior managerial and directorial positions. Women leave the industry, often to have families, and don’t return, costing it millions in recruitment and training costs – quite unnecessarily. The hurdles to retaining female talent are varied – the challenge of balancing work and family time as well as a lack of training and mentoring are among the barriers women face.

Research has shown that people tend to recruit and promote people like themselves. It’s a case of familiarity – we like what we know. However, if, as is the case in the hospitality sector, only 6% of all board positions are female, the likelihood of women progressing via the ‘like-promotes-like’ mechanism is tiny. Bearing in mind that across all UK industry sectors only 12% of board positions are taken by women, we can’t rely on peer pressure to precipitate change either.

Senior executives are the ones determining business strategy concerning recruitment, hours, training, mentoring, promotion, conditions, and salaries. Their experience is that the system works; it has enabled them to climb to the top – so why change it? Well, there is good reason for change because women make up 58% of the hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism workforce and is it’s estimated that 310,000 female workers leave the industry each year. This is costing businesses £2.8bn in replacement recruitment and initial training. When Women 1st delved into the reasons why women were not progressing to senior positions, it found that, along with a lack of flexible and part-time working arrangements, there was gender-bias within recruitment processes, exclusion from business networks and a lack of visible women in senior positions.

Women operate in a different way to men and are more likely to lack confidence in their work-based abilities and are less willing to ‘give it a go’ for fear of failure. Our research revealed that women felt that they lacked suitable career training, role models and mentoring opportunities. Evidence from Women 1st has shown that with the right training, mentoring and support, women flourish.

If businesses are serious about helping women reach the highest levels of their business, driving growth and injecting fresh thinking, organisations need to go further than just offering flexible working arrangements. They need a well thought out career development plan; they need to mentor them and they need to track their progress through their organisation. Given the lack of training and development some women receive at their workplace it is perhaps unsurprising that Women 1st found that some female employees lack of self-confidence, have poor communication skills and low self-awareness. And, while these are not in themselves complex issues for a clued-up business to address, they can be quite debilitating for the individual to suffer.

Mentoring can play a crucial role in helping someone take their career to the next level and it’s important for mentors and mentees to be carefully matched as factors such as chemistry and empathy are important. Internal mentors can be very beneficial for those looking for immediate guidance and career support within their organisation, but feedback shows that having an external mentor can be better for longer-term career development as they often have a broader perspective to draw on.

Once female managers receive appropriate training and mentoring, career progression often follows. It’s important for managers to meet with their staff regularly, obtain feedback on the training and track their progress in the organisation. In fact, this ability to track the results of the training programmes available through Women 1st, and the views of women and their managers, helped to refine the programmes. Having a structure in place that tracks career progression and supports women in dealing with any obstacles or challenges is essential.

In this blog I’ve touched on a number of challenges and solutions drawn from a wide variety of rich but dispersed sources – and it was this that stimulated the idea that we needed to write a book. We couldn’t find a single source which presented all the facts, best practice, experts and expertise in one place in an easy to read, accessible and engaging format. That’s why we wrote The Little Book of Diversity. On 19 June we are hosting our second annual Women 1st Conference and we have senior female executives from leading brands including Coca Cola, Tesco, Ernst & Young and more sharing their experiences as well as providing inspiration and practical guidance – to help women progress their careers and to help organisations better manage their diversity agendas.