Glass Walls in Hospitality: What’s Holding Women Back and How to Break Through

Last week at the AAHOA HerOwnership conference at the Sonesta Resort Hilton Head Island, the ballroom got a wake-up call. Researcher and author Amy Diehl, PhD, co-author of Glass Walls, didn’t come to play. She came armed with data, stories, and solutions, showing exactly how gender bias still walls women off from leadership in hospitality. And her message was clear: this is not about “fixing women.” It is about fixing workplace culture.

Diehl knows the terrain firsthand. As a young computer science graduate, she thought the world of work was a meritocracy. Do the work, reap the rewards. Simple. But when she stepped into leadership, the rules shifted. Behaviors applauded in her male colleagues were dismissed in her. That dissonance sparked her PhD research and, ultimately, her book Glass Walls, which dissects the barriers women face across industries and offers leaders a playbook to tear them down.

Why The Rolling Suitcase Took 60 Years

Diehl grabbed the room with a story hoteliers instantly connected to: the rolling suitcase. The idea actually dates back to 1928, when artist Anita Willets-Burnham attached baby-carriage wheels and a telescoping handle to her trunk before a world tour. Yet by the 1970s, when American luggage executive Bernard Sadow tried to sell a refined version, department stores balked. Why? Two stubborn gender stereotypes: men carry bags, and women do not travel alone.

The invention was too “feminine” to succeed. Retailers left money on the table for decades because decision-making was filtered through a single perspective. Only when a male airline pilot designed a pilot-friendly bag did the concept finally take off. Diehl’s point was clear: innovation does not fail for lack of good ideas. It fails when the people at the table cannot see beyond their own experience. For hospitality, that is a flashing neon sign. Want to accelerate design, product, and service innovation? Make sure the table itself is diverse.

Where Women Stall In Hotels

Hospitality looks female on the surface. Walk into most hotels and women are everywhere: running the front desk, managing teams, filling the mid-level pipeline. In fact, at the director level women and men reach near parity.

But climb higher and the air thins fast. Vice presidents, managing directors, and C-suite seats are overwhelmingly male. At the very top, presidents and CEOs are still rare: women hold just 6 percent of roles, a ratio of 16 men for every woman. And when women do reach “chief” positions, they are most often in HR or Marketing, while finance, operations, and ownership remain heavily male.

Diehl’s takeaway was blunt: hotels are cultivating talent but not promoting it. The leadership bench is strong, but owners and brands are drawing from only half the pool.

The Six “Glass Walls” Women Face

After laying out the leadership pipeline, Diehl turned to the barriers themselves. She and her co-author, Dr. Leanne Dzubinski, built a scientifically validated scale to measure women’s experiences of bias across industries. The result was clear: whether in tech, higher education, nonprofits, or hotels, women run into the same six obstacles.

• Male privilege – gatekeeping cultures, boys’ clubs, and token women chosen to maintain the status quo. Diehl recalled a vendor pitching HR software through a Phillies baseball promotion, tone-deaf for a profession that is three-quarters female.

  
  

• Disproportionate constraints – women must walk a fine line: too direct and they are “aggressive,” too tentative and they are “weak.” Terms like he-peat (a man repeating a woman’s idea and getting credit) and manterrupting capture how bias plays out in meetings.

  
  

• Insufficient support – fewer mentors, sponsors, and financial backers, especially for women pursuing ownership. Lenders often see women’s financial profiles as “risk” instead of opportunity.
  

• Devaluation – “office housework,” credibility gaps, and pay inequities, even in female-dominated roles. Women are often expected to take notes, plan parties, or “help out” in ways that rarely earn recognition.
  

• Hostility – harassment, retaliation, and the infamous “glass cliff,” where women are put into leadership during crisis and blamed if recovery does not come fast enough.
  

• Acquiescence – after years of barriers, some women reduce ambition or decline promotions. This is not about confidence, it is a rational response to structures that make advancement costly.
  

What Leaders Can Do Now

For hotel companies, the fix is not abstract. It is operational and it starts at the top. Diehl offered a straightforward checklist:

• Invest in leadership development, mentoring, and sponsorship for women.

• Replace competition with collaboration and reward teamwork.

• Measure performance by goals, not face time.

• Offer flexibility where roles allow: scheduling, childcare, parental leave.

• Make decisions in the room, not on the golf course.

• Eliminate overwork as a badge of honor.

• Design clear, safe reporting systems for harassment with zero retaliation.

  
  

Why It Matters For Hospitality

Diehl closed on a note that was both pragmatic and hopeful. Bias is real, but it is not personal and it is not permanent. The structures that created it can be redesigned. For leaders, that means building cultures where women and everyone else can succeed without apology. For women themselves, it means knowing the patterns so they do not internalize them, finding allies inside and outside the industry, and remembering that ambition is portable. If one organization does not value it, another will.

Her final message was simple, but it hit home: this is not a women’s problem. It’s a business problem. And solving it will make our industry stronger, smarter, and far more innovative.

Article is based on an audio recording provided by Heather Carnes.