Officials of nonprofit Castell Project, Inc., an organization dedicated to accelerating the careers of women professionals in the hospitality industry, released the “Black Representation in Hospitality Leadership 2021” report.
According to the report, Black employees lost share of hospitality industry employment and remained underrepresented in leadership over the past year. The report shows the public face of hospitality industry leadership. Analysts captured information from the websites of hotel companies based in the U.S. or Canada listed in the STR Directory of Hotel & Lodging Companies. Each entry was reviewed twice, once in the company website and then compared to the LinkedIn profile. The dataset includes 7,243 people in 801 companies for 2020. Statistics shown reflect employees from the level of director through CEO.
Some highlights of the report include:
- Black representation in leadership for the public face of the hospitality industry fell from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, only 11 percent of the 801 hotel company websites reviewed for this study showed Black executives (director through CEO) compared to 16 percent of 630 company websites in 2019.
- Black executives represented 1.6 percent of hospitality industry executives at the director through CEO level on company websites in 2020. This is 10.9 times lower than their 17.5 percent share of hospitality industry employment. This indicates that advancement is not equitable for Black employees in the hospitality industry.
- One in 5.7 industry employees is Black compared to one of 49 vice presidents and one of 58 EVP/SVPs shown on websites at year-end 2020.
Photo: Courtesy of Castell Project, Inc.
