Leisure Industry Continues to Struggle With Huge Gender Imbalance

The leisure industry still has a very long way to go when it comes to achieving gender equality.

A recent review of publicly listed companies found that a mere 7 percent of the top spots in the leisure industry are held by women, which is a stark contrast to what is now a 50-50 gender balance in the overall workforce.

The research, conducted by Aptamind Partners and supported by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), is based on publicly available data from the world’s largest hotel groups, casinos, and entertainment companies.

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The findings show that the leisure industry’s gender gap worsens the further up the career ladder you look. From a 50 percent overall balance across the leisure industry’s workforce, the percentage of women drops to 42 percent in mid-level management and 33 percent in senior management, according to the report “The Numbers Behind Women in Leadership: Leisure.” Once you reach the C-suite level, the disparity is even starker—just one in five executives are women.

“While some progress has been made in the last two years, there is still a huge amount of work to be done,” Aradhana Khowala, CEO of Aptamind Partners said in a statement. “We need a wholesale shift in the way we think and talk about gender and leadership.”

The industry needs to move beyond well-meaning initiatives and box-ticking exercises and instead start taking concrete steps to address the imbalance and have more women in leadership positions, Khowala added.

One of the major barriers to improving gender diversity is the lack of insightful and robust data in the public domain.

“We cannot wait any longer for the arc of history to bend the right way on its own. We need to benchmark where we are at so we can push forward together with concerted, collective action,” said Khowala.

The casino and entertainment industry has made slightly more progress than hotels-with three female CEOs and four female chairs, the report reveals.

The marginal improvement in the percentage of female leaders and executives in the hotel sector, unfortunately, has failed to translate into more women in leadership and senior roles.

Alison Brittain, who was the only female representative in the CEO group at the time the research was conducted, has since left her role, the report notes. Brittain was CEO of the British hotel firm Whitbread PLC, which owns and manages the Premier Inn chain. She retired in January 2023. Her replacement was Dominic Paul, who was CEO at Domino’s Pizza Group in the U.K. and Ireland.

Despite the dismal statistics, change is possible. On this front, the report points to the increasing percentage of women on the boards of leisure companies as evidence of this fact. Representation on leisure company boards has grown from 17 percent in 2007 to 28 percent as of 2022.

In recent years, the representation of women on the boards of casinos and entertainment companies has also shown progress—increasing from a paltry 6 percent in 2019 to 12 percent in 2021.

"This issue goes beyond equity and fairness,” said Julia Simpson, president and CEO of WTTC. “Companies need to hold themselves accountable to guarantee progress is made over time.”

The report also offers several steps the leisure industry could take to ensure that progress happens. The steps include:

—Better disclosure
—Regular reporting
—Independent regulation and verification
—Incentivizing
—Holding leadership accountable for progress on gender diversity

"Putting women on the center stage of travel and tourism will ensure a better future for the sector," said Simpson.

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