“Who’s good at math?” Peggy Berg asked the crowd at the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s ForWard: Women Advancing Hospitality conference. The response was laughter – and not too many raised hands.
That’s a problem, said Berg, who reminded the group of a few hundred mostly women gathered at the InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile that first, they were better at math than they were admitting, and second, women need to take more responsibility for numbers – specifically, those associated with profit and loss — if they want to advance.
“In order to get more compensation, in order to move into leadership, we need to have P&L responsibility,” said Berg, who heads the Castell Project, a nonprofit aimed at advancing women in hospitality leadership roles. “We have those responsibilities at home. We have actually P&L responsibility across the whole economy where we control the majority of spending. But we don’t yet have P&L responsibility, in many cases, in our businesses.”
She urged the women, who were joining the conference from major U.S. hotel and hospitality companies around the country, to consider how they could acquire more P&L responsibility and pave their path. “That’s your track to leadership in your company. That’s your track to wealth for your family.”
It’s a “remarkable” time for women in business, Berg said. “We are a stronger talent pool than has ever before existed for women anywhere… We have a kind of support that we’ve never really had before. And a strong economy favors us in the same way it favored women in World War II, and hopefully this time it will last longer in terms of how it favors us.”
Another key number: A move from no female leadership to 30% female representation in company leadership is associated with a 15% increase in net revenue margin, Berg says. Not only are those companies more profitable, “they’re more resilient and ultimately more agile. Diverse leadership is important.”
Read more: The leading reason women step back from hospitality
The most recent Women in Hospitality Industry Leadership study (download a copy of the report), shows progress, Berg said. “In procurement, revenue management, marketing and HR, in fields where women have been given an opportunity to grow, we are around 1:1 (women to men). We’re fully competitive.” Where the women-to-men ratio is lower, she pointed out, is the fields where there is more compensation.
“It’s not that those people are working more, it’s not that they’re producing more, it’s just that they’re in fields where there’s more compensation, and (women) need to be in those fields, too.”
It’s not about moving laterally, either – Berg pointed out that a strong complement of women in director and vice president roles helps build a pipeline to executive or senior vice president, where the ratio of women to men is more like 1:3.
But there’s hope: The (mostly men) in those positions are “kind of old,” Berg said, to more laughter. “They’re baby boomers. They’re my generation or older. They’re going to retire. So the question for us, the question for you, is who at that director or VP level is going to be ready to take over when that guy retires? Because most of them, frankly, will be retiring in the next five to seven years, and that’s an opportunity for you.”
This is the second annual conference by the AH&LA and featured speakers and panels addressing diversity and succession, and breakout sessions on leadership and hotel ownership. Marilyn Carlson Nelson, former chairman and CEO of Minnesota-based, family-owned travel company Carlson, which created the Radisson hotel brand, among others, received the event’s Icon award.
