The CEO of BESydney, Lyn Lewis-Smith, talks to CMW about the recent report commissioned by the bureau, jointly with the PCMA Foundation and released at Convening Leaders 2024 in San Diego, Advancing Women in Business Events:
What was the objective of producing this research and what were its findings?
There has always been a focus on women in leadership. I’ve been a huge advocate of enabling women leaders and so I’ve done a lot of work in this space outside of the industry. I was curious to know, because we do a lot of work under our publicly listed companies, the ASX 100, in terms of female leadership at the C suite, CEO and board level and board chairs. And when I started to look for data on tourism, hospitality and business events, I found two pieces of very reliable data. One is the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the other is a Workplace Gender equality agenda, which is a federal government set up and independent. It’s a first in the world. And it takes the ABS stats, and there’s a couple of lines in there on food and accommodation services, and arts and recreation.
When we looked at the data, for the upper echelon of C suite, it was less than 20% females that were leading organisations or being chairs or on boards within the tourism, hospitality and leisure sector. We then strip that data back to look at business events, it was exactly the same. But what’s really glaringly obvious in our industry globally, is we are made up more than 50% of women in the business events industry and in tourism and leisure as well, in actual fact, in the US it is 86%. But when you get to the CEO and C suite level, it dives below 20%. Is that acceptable?
I find at the foundation, there’s a fundamental issue in our industry that women are at a glass ceiling and just cannot break through. The figure should it be 30% or 40%. So that was the moonshot.
We had a partnership with PCMA, we looked at a big piece of work that was done by Korn Ferry, the big executive search company and PwC in the UK, on tourism, hospitality and leisure. We thought we’d get PCMA to work with the foundation and BESydney and focus on the business events industry and gain insights in terms of recommendations to move forward to try to close the gap.
What was the timescale involved in that?
We started doing facilitated workshops in March last year. We did one in Washington, DC, one in San Francisco, then PwC went out to the PCMA database and I think close to 600 replies came back from that set of questions, and then we did one-on-one interviews as well. We would have liked to have more than 600 plus respondents, but it gave us a baseline,
Was it mainly a US response?
It was heavily skewed towards the US because of the nature of the PCMA membership, but we had UK, Europe, Asia/Pacific involved all giving very different responses from each cultural region and continent.
Why there is a disproportionate lack of woman at C-Suite level in our industry? Has the research illuminated reasons for this?
It comes in under three headings. The first is Individual. So, within the report, it’s about women backing themselves and getting out of the way of each other and allowing themselves to be ambitious and pursue the opportunity.
The second was the Organisational Level, where there were two really glaringly obvious areas. Organisations and leaders aren’t investing in the pathways and professional development of their women, to get them to the C-Suite, there were a very small percentage that were actually allocated a budget.
The next was around Mentoring – with little structure around an organisation seeking mentoring opportunities.
Also, there are so many things out of our control, such as childcare, pay parity, affordable housing, but have an impact on why women don’t pursue or move through the ranks into senior leadership positions. And when I said since senior leadership, I mean, CEO and boards and chairs. There are plenty of us at the two IC level, we’re just not getting to that higher level.
What are the critical steps that need to be taken to address this and move this forward so that we do see that percentage increasing?
First off, we need to talk about it. And you are actually one of only two media people that are keen to highlight this. Not a lot have showed interest in this since we launched it with PCMA. The final report is yet to come out and hopefully that will get some traction. I think Carina Bauer from IMEX will do something at IMEX Frankfurt this year. So, it’s awareness, The final report will have recommendations, then it’s for my team and PCMA to come together, to lead this. I’d love to see from an industry level that we have, say, 20 diverse leaders that will come forward and say they’re going to mentor a person within their organisation, and create a pathway and professional development plan for that person to aspire. Because you can’t just appoint someone to the role and not everyone’s cut out for that work. We understand that but we can identify young women that are ambitious and then help them manage.
I’d love to see a global mentor programme established. We see initiatives running like 20 under 20 and 30 under 30, but there’s nothing specific around mentoring women. I’m mentoring a wonderful woman who was in our San Francisco workshop. She worked for George P. Johnson and I’ve been mentoring since March last year and, although she’s now moved outside of the industry, we’re working on her coming back in at a higher level?
Are there any existing initiatives in place that do have these kinds of programmes or support groups in place to identify and help support women to more senior positions?
There are a lot of other industry sectors out there doing this type of thing that we could copy: the Champions of Change Coalition is one. There’s Chief Executive Women, which is another service. Being Sydney-based, these I’ve just mentioned are Australian, but there are international organisations that do exist, which are highlighted in the report.
There was a little bit of backlash from the findings in this report. Why was that and what have you heard?
It’s a bit of a disquiet. I would presume that because we see so many women in the industry, we immediately dismiss that there’s an issue and we’re not actually reading the report when we’re talking about women at CEO, board and chair level. A lot of people would look on the surface and say we don’t have a problem. But they need to read the report to see that there’s a significant problem with pathways to leadership.
What are the challenges? What are the obstacles that are keeping it from progressing? And what can we do to change that?
A lot of that has to do with the individuals and imposter syndrome. There is a stigma attached to women in that they need 100% of the competencies to apply for a job, and men probably only need 50%, and they go in all guns blazing. So, it’s a confidence thing, being confident and competent. And, you know, having role models to aspire to as well,
I would love to see more men talking about this, and recognising that an 80/20 is not good enough. Should we be striving for 30% by 2030? Or even 40%? Set a target and then collectively work out – what are the best strategies? And then implementing them.
We need to sit down and set some targets now and then discuss what are the strategies that sit under that. Now we have the report, in full, we can look at the data holistically, and then maybe benchmark that and do it again in a couple of years. But in the meantime, put those strategies in place and measure those strategies along the way.
It’s all about having the conversation and bringing this to the fore, being bold enough to talk about it, that it is an issue and to not being scared of the backlash.
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