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Study: Black execs largely absent from hospitality leadership

The recent spotlight on the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. has triggered endless corporate pledges of support for diversity and inclusion. Results of a new study by The Castell Project, however, tell a different story.

The numbers don’t lie: 18.8% of U.S. hospitality industry workers are black, but only 1.5% of hospitality industry executives are. That low proportion not only falls well short of reflecting the overall racial makeup of the hospitality workforce, it lags far behind the national average of 5% black executives found across industries.  

Of the 630 company websites reviewed for the study, 84% did not show a single black executive.

Getty Images
Getty Images

An introduction to the study, “Black Representation in Hospitality Leadership,” notes that results like this “could only occur in an industry that is structurally biased against black employees… Hospitality is even more dependent on black employees than other industries in North America, so equity, equality and inclusion are vitally important.”

Researchers on The Castell Project report gathered information on job titles by reviewing websites of companies listed in the STR Directory of Hotel & Lodging Companies. They compiled data from 630 of the 971 companies based in the U.S. and Canada. The study reflects 6,302 employees at the director through CEO level.

The study found that black women hold an even smaller share of leadership roles: At the CEO level, 0.8% are black men versus 0.1% black women; among senior vice president/executive vice president positions, it’s 1% vs. 0.5%; and 1.1% of VP posts belong to men, 0.6% to women.

Black men represent only 1% of all men at the mid-management director and above levels. Black women make up 2.8% of all women in those roles, but their overall ranks are still very small, given that women overall hold only 27% of executive-level positions in hospitality.

Black women also tend to be siloed in human resources positions, the report found. Two thirds-of women at the mid-management director level were in HR roles.

Why the disparity?

“I think the reasons are not something you can put into statistics,” says Peggy Berg, director of The Castell Project. “There’s a gap between what you think is right, what you say and what you actually do. We think we need to say something, but actually doing it is much harder.”

Berg says she wasn’t totally surprised by the results of the study. “You just look around the room, and you know there’s a diversity problem in the industry, just like you know there’s a gender issue,” she says. “There’s a vague feeling that something’s not right.” The Castell Project is a nonprofit whose goal is for women to hold more than one in three leadership and ownership positions in hospitality.

“The ratio should be one in five (black executives). It’s one in 145 at the C-suite level. I didn’t really get the scale of the problem until I saw that,” Berg says.

Having figures like those from the report can provide a benchmark for hospitality companies to measure their progress, she adds. “I think it always helps to have statistics when you enter into a discussion. When you’re dealing with statistics, they are actionable — how are you going to  change the numbers?”

Best practices for developing a more inclusive and diverse leadership team are widely available, Berg says. Accountability — in the form of compensation — seems to be the missing piece, she adds.

“When you tie executive compensation to diversity in leadership — a commitment to moving people up in a diverse and equitable way — that’s serious,” she observes.

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