Techo de cristal y planes de igualdad. Estudio de casos en cadenas hoteleras españolas

Santero, R., Castro, R.B. y Castaño, M. (2020): Techo de cristal y planes de igualdad: Estudio de casos en cadenas hoteleras españolas, Revista del Ministerio de Trabajo y Economía Social, 146, 15-45.

Resumen: 

Decent work and gender equality is among the key challenges in the international agenda, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) launched by the United Nations in its agenda 2030. In particular, SDG 5 deals explicitly with gender equality, and SDG 8, focused on decent work and sustainable growth, has among its targets to foster gender pay equality. Moreover, SDG 8, explicitly includes a reference to the role of sustainable tourism activity, acknowledging the importance of tourism in sustainable growth and decent work. The analysis of hospitality is crucial to the understanding of sustainable tourism and decent work. Firstly, because the role of women in this sector reflects the associated stereotypes to her role at home, and that is at the core of the segregation suffered at work, both horizontal and vertical. Moreover, hotels show a masculinization of power positions, which translates into the existence of a glass ceiling phenomenon in the professional career of women. In this sense, Spain is an interesting case for the study of gender equality at hotels. The country is the fifth economy of the EU, with an important contribution of tourism to the economic activity, and reaches the ninth position in the Gender Equality Index published by the EU. Along the last decades, it has shown a commitment with the reduction of gender discrimination at work, with a proactive legal and political agenda. The Organic Law for Effective Equality Between Women and Men approved in Spain in 2007 (in Spanish LOEIMH) made mandatory for big firms, over 250 employees, the design and implementation of equality plans focused on fostering and implementing measures to reach equality between man and woman at work, including the inequalities associated to the glass ceiling phenomenon. After a decade of the approval of the LOEIMH, it seems a proper time to analyze and evaluate the accomplishment of the purposes of the law, including the equality plans. The objective of this work is to analyze the equality plans and, in particular, their impact on the dynamics associated to the glass ceiling phenomenon in the hospitality industry in Spain. We study four key aspects that those plans must include: Participation of women in decision positions, with special mention to the board; training programs inside firms and its relationship with professional promotion; conciliation measures and, in fourth term, retributions and gender pay gap. We study if the existence of those measures have fostered an increase in the women participation in management and board positions and a reduction in the gender pay gap, in line with the objectives of the LOEIMH regarding reducing the differences between men and women at work. The case study used the information published by the firms and secondary sources. The analysis of the two cases shows their equity plans explicitly include objectives and instruments in terms of promotion, training, conciliation and wages, as it is legally required, but they present a different degree of detail. With this regard, it is worth mentioning that there is still a way to go in terms of transparency, as the available information desegregated by sex is still incomplete in order to properly evaluate the impact of equality plans or even leaves aside some key aspects such as the disaggregation of new hiring by sex and occupational category. There has not been a significant translation of the measures approved in the equality plans into results in terms of the evolution of vertical segregation. It is true that the participation of women in some corporative or hotel management positions are close to parity, and were even before the approval of the plans, but for positions with higher responsibility, and with lower share of woman, that participation has increased only slightly. Thus, the glass ceiling remains a challenge in these groups, and data for the listed firms in Spain shows that they lag behind the average behavior for women participation in boards, although the results are the opposite for lower management positions. This situation is also reflected in the lower participation of women in training programs related to promotion to directors. The gender gap is also observed in wages, where men earn more than women do, especially as we move up in the career ladder. Finally, if we compare the two hotel groups, the available information shows a better situation at Meliá group, in terms of transparency, with sex disaggregated data in almost all sections of their annual report, and also, in terms of the glass ceiling phenomenon, with higher share of women in the upper management positions. Thus, the analysis of the equality plans of both groups show, firstly, that a strong commitment for an effective implementation of these plans must have a reflection on, among other things, transparency, as a key previous step to an accurate diagnosis, which in turn is a key element in the design of a plan with the adequate objectives and instruments. But also, and equally important, proper data is key to the development specific tools for the evaluation of the plan and the identification of the possible deviations along the period of implementation. Of course, the fight against gender discrimination at work, including glass ceiling phenomenon, is not only responsibility of the firms, and a deeper collaboration among firms, institutions and society is crucial, as the causes and mechanisms behind the different situations of women and men at work are quite complex and associated to global social patterns, that ends up being reproduced at work. In this sense, literature shows that hospitality industry is among the ones that represent to a greater extend some of the social dynamics in terms of roles associated to women and men, and thus, it constitutes an interesting industry to be analyzed.