Women in Hospitality: Empowerment or Exploitation? A Study of Frontline Hotels in the Kathmandu

Abstract

Hospitality has often been conceptualized as a pathway to women's economic participation, visibility and mobility. This conceptualization however captures only a partial look to the hospitality sector. Hotels are also known for long working hours, emotionally taxing work, repeated contact with guests and hierarchical management structures, which have the potential to undermine the agency of women in the workplace and limit their career prospects. This study examines whether the work of frontline hotel in the Kathmandu Valley is more of a vehicle for empowerment or, on the other side of the spectrum, a style of exploitation for the women employees. A quantitative, cross sectional research design is used and four antecedents of perceived workplace empowerment are proposed, namely; pay equity, opportunities for career advancement, workplace harassment, and training support. A structured questionnaire including Likert-scale items was used to administer the questionnaire to the frontline female hotel staff. The article then presents the results of the analysis in accordance with the research design. Results show that the factors of pay equity and career advancement opportunities have positive and statistically significant effects on empowerment, while the factor of workplace harassment has a negative and significant impact on empowerment. Training support does not result in a statistically significant effect after controlling for pay equity, promotional prospects and harassment. The conclusion of the paper is that the inclusion of women in hospitality needs to be appraised by the intricacies of their daily working experiences and not just through aggregate employment figures.