Our Findings
Over 75% of the event workforce is women. Less than 1/3rd of them make it into senior roles.
Over the course of a 2-year international research project, we found that gendered inequalities hindered career progression in the events industry. This inequality stems from both societal norms, industry culture and organizational structures – often so deeply ingrained that they are hard to identify, and easy to deny.
Many of the organisations within the event industry are organisations that were built by men, for men. This invariably leads to organisations with rules, policies and procedures that work for many men, but not for many women. Furthermore, our research found that perceptions of leadership in events are often shaped around what good looks like from a male perspective, with women facing “sticky floors” which result in lower wages, limited progression opportunities, and greater barriers to leadership.
As a result of our extensive research project, three academic papers on the challenges for women in event leadership have been published, exploring: 1) threats to women’s leadership development, 2) the push or pull of female entrepreneurship, and 3) the denial of gender inequality.
The Triple Threat To Women’s Leadership Development In Events: A Gendered Organisation Perspective
This paper explores the hidden ways in which event organisations are gendered and how this affects the development of women’s leadership careers. By foregrounding the voices of women in events, we were able to propose a new model of factors that influence the development of women’s leadership careers – Women's work; Women in Work and Perfect Age – we called these to triple threat to women’s success.
Gendered Perceptions of Women in Event Workplaces – Women told us that they faced a series of impossible choices between developing their own leadership careers and maintaining their social and family commitments. Organisational processes in events often involve long, unsocial hours and working way from home and a culture of overwork – our participants felt they had to make impossible tradeoffs between a leadership career and their personal lives. This was compounded by additional hidden structural and societal barriers related to perceptions of women as still being the primary caregivers in families. Women face multiple invisible barriers to leadership including organisational misconceptions of women, stereotypes and cultural factors and our participants often had to step out of the industry to have a family, then return at a lower position and work their way back up. This “sticky floor” has women in events stuck with low pay and limited possibilities for advancement.
Gendered Perceptions of Event Work – There is a widely held perception of much (but not all) event work as being ‘women’s work’. We found that traditional views of gender roles influence norms in events businesses – women were expected to have the more caring and nurturing roles, whilst technical or strategic roles are viewed as men’s roles. Occupational identities in events workplaces that align with gendered perceptions of work creates systemic discrimination where work is less valued or women are treated as having less knowledge or expertise. Some respondents shared experiences of being asked for the male in a team to discuss technical elements because ‘women wouldn’t understand’. These findings support the ‘glass slipper’ theory - where some jobs have inherent characteristics and make them a natural fit for some, whilst a stretch or even an impossibility for others.
The Perfect Age – The event industry has a problem with age. Sexists or misogynist judgements on women’s identities or bodies produce another invisible barriers to career progression and throughout our findings a theme of the unattainable ‘perfect age’ emerged. Women feel that they are always either too young – too inexperienced, not wise enough, too pretty – to be taken seriously or too old, and unable to take on ‘demanding’ roles in the event industry. Young women, whilst valued for their youthful aesthetic, are not valued for their talent, knowledge or skills.As they advance in age and in career, they are perceived as a risk or threat as they reach the perceived inevitability of maternity leave and family responsibilities. Beyond this, women suggested that the industry becomes too physically demanding, resulting in them naturally ageing out of the industry – something that happens to women, but not to men.
Women’s Perceptions Of The Route Into Events Entrepreneurship - The Negativity Lens, Gender Regimes and Unforeseen Opportunity Entrepreneurship
This paper explored why some women in events become entrepreneurs. Findings showed that some viewed entrepreneurship as a necessity - they felt pushed into entrepreneurship to gain leadership roles due to gender discrimination, a desire for work-life balance, and autonomy. In comparison, men often see entrepreneurship as a pull of opportunity.
The findings reveal that women often perceive their entrepreneurial journey through a negative lens, viewing themselves as necessity rather than opportunity entrepreneurs due to their past experiences in a sector where the patriarchy persists in practice. Key findings include:
Escape the overworking culture - entrepreneurship offers the opportunity to regain work-life balance.
Combatting negative gender regimes – entrepreneurship offering an opportunity to tackle inequality of wages, Motherhood pay penalty, and Motherhood tax.
Control over career goals - entrepreneurship as they only option to gain a leadership role, as personal progression had been hindered by gender stereotypes.
Leadership confidence - running their own business, respondents felt they had more confidence both in how they worked, how they lead and who they worked with. Entrepreneurship allowed them an escape from what they reported to be constant undermining behaviours, such as men interrupting in meetings or male clients asking to speak to other males about technical aspects.
Women entrepreneurs break the negative work culture and gender regimes – participants felt that women create better workplaces and work cultures following poor personal experiences. Offering better maternity and terms of pay, flexible working and work-life balance to future generations.
Its Not You, It’s Me - Women’s Denial Of Gendered Inequalities In The Event Industry
Gender inequalities are a persistent barrier to career progression in industries predominately occupied by women – such as the event industry. This study used a Delphi study of women in the UK and Australia to analyse women’s leadership careers in events. Findings demonstrated that societal and business factors combine to create a wicked problem – women make up most of the workforce, but this is not reflected in the number of women in senior roles.
The exploratory research suggested that women in events often deny the existence of gendered inequalities. They do this to protect their careers and to protect their own sense of identity, helping them to cope with pervasive gender identity threats in the workplace.
Denial that there is a problem – despite presenting us with frequent, multiple and complex examples of gendered inequalities they had experienced whilst working in events, many respondents denied that there was gender discrimination at all, or that their gender was the cause of their stymied career progression. When we asked directly if there was a sexism problem in events, more than two thirds of our panelists said that there was not.We turned to literature on coping and social identity to try to understand why this might be the case.
Denial is an Identity Threat Response – we found some evident that denial is used to individually cope with gender discrimination; women deny sexism or misogynistic experiences have happened to them or happen to others because they are aware that they cannot eliminate the threat. So to cope with it, and to protect their identity as a women, they deny the threat exists.
Denial as Devaluation of Threat – our findings indicated some denials were rooted in seeking individual reasons for their own success.This meritocracy stemmed from a psychological need to preserve a sense of agency and self-worth in the face of pervasive discrimination.We found evidence of self-praise for advancement and self-blame for lack of leadership progress, rather than blame being attached to the system and structure of the industry or the organisations they worked within. Throughout the data, we saw examples of women apportioning blame for their lack of leadership progression to decisions they had made (e.g. “I allowed my desire to have a family stop my progression”; “The way I navigated motherhood has really stilted my career”). We also encountered women who internalized their bias – their choices outside of the workforce made them not worthy of leadership opportunities.
Denial as Status Quo Bias – There was also evidence of the “I thrived so you can too” mentality of some women in events. This Queen Bee phenomenon, where women disassociate with other women as a group because they thrived against the odds – this can lead to women being more critical of other women.
Denial as a system justification – this emerged strongly. Women often cite the fact the industry does not work for them – this is just how working events is - long hours, difficult working patterns, etc. - and that does not work for me once I have caring commitments. Women say this to buffer the impact of discrimination and to make the system feel fair – they feel that because it’s a norm in the industry, we can’t challenge or change it.
Read the full research here:
The Triple Threat to Women’s Leadership Development in Events: A Gendered Organization Perspective
It's Not You, It's Me—Women's Denial of Gendered Inequalities in the Event Industry