After Best Western’s fourth annual Women in Leadership Forum ended, Dorothy Dowling, SVP and chief marketing officer at Best Western Hotels & Resorts and founder of the forum, spoke with Hotel Management about why she created the event and why supporting women in hospitality is important.
Over the course of 35 years in hospitality, Dowling has frequently been the only woman in the room when important decisions were being made—as have many of her professional and personal friends. Dowling wanted to change that, and has been leveraging her position and her contacts to launch associations and forums to effect changes. “We've been able to forge patterns and really think about that next generation [and] how we can support it differently,” she said.
Dowling, who recently was re-elected president of the Global Business Travel Association’s Allied Leadership Council, also is senior advisor for the GBTA WINiT’s strategic advisory board. (WINiT is a network of women and men focused on driving positive change for the career mobility of women in travel-related industries.) In December, Dowling and 19 other business leaders founded the Women in Travel Thrive community, focused on increasing representation of women in leadership roles across all travel and hospitality sectors.
Dowling also is a member of the board of directors for the CubeSmart storage company, and was the third woman to join that team. This gave her a chance to see what could be accomplished when leadership is not dominated by one gender. “I just felt a culture shift, because it's almost an equal leadership mix in terms of very accomplished men and very accomplished women,” she said. “But when I contrast most of my experiences of being the only woman in the room, there's a different level of conversation, there's a different level of engagement, and you don't have to be the standard-bearer.”
All of these initiatives, including the Best Western forum, stem from understanding that successful women should nurture other women on their career journeys. “We all need that mutual support of sponsorship and mentorship to be able to appeal to that next generation of leaders,” Dowling said. “For many of us that have been blessed in our career, we believe that we want to share some of our learnings and hopefully bring some of those opportunities forward.”
Strength in Diversity
Women entrepreneurs are a very significant opportunity for hotel brands, Dowling said, and women-led businesses have a “very deep” success factor in terms of revenue. “I was part of the women's events at AAHOA many years ago, but it was very evident to me that women were the backbone of the industry,” she said. “Not often were they necessarily front and center in terms of being the GM in the business, but they were running the businesses.”
Today, Dowling estimates that 35 percent of hotels are run by women. “Everybody wants that 50/50 goal to reflect what the population looks like,” she said. “But we have to build the bridges to allow women to get there.”
Mutual Support
In December, Silvia Camarota, senior director of North America market management, lodging, at Expedia Group, a founding member of Women in Travel Thrive, estimated that women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to the COVID-19 crisis than men’s jobs. “For women in travel, the job losses and long-term risk for career regression are immense,” she said at the time.
The recent McKinsey and Lean In annual study on women in the workplace that Dowling cited in her welcome address to the forum’s attendees found that over the past year, one in three women considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their career—”a significant increase from one in four in the first few months of the pandemic,” the report claimed.
But throughout the downturn, Dowling said, women in hospitality unified to lift each other up and offer support. “I felt that very strongly through COVID,” she said. And as more women reach the top ranks of more companies, they can open the doors for other women behind them. “I am a big proponent of the diversity numbers because I do think that having numbers on equity [and] having numbers on diversity actually pave the way forward.”
Another way to support professional women is to offer support for parenting responsibilities. “The hybrid work environment is going to benefit a lot of women—as long as they don't become invisible,” Dowling said. “One of my fears is that ‘out of sight’ [means] ‘out of mind.’ We've got to continue to sponsor those women into the roles that they deserve in their careers.”