Bashar Wali built a lifestyle-hotel company over 15 years, brand and communications, commercial strategy, finance, technology and distribution, marketing, sales, revenue, and HR and culture were every one of them led by a woman. At Practice Hospitality , the company he runs today, he has been intentional in building a team that has strong female representation. Wali is clear on the value of a diverse team, “Despite the fact that I am the founder and my president is a man, and we are the outliers in the room, and our company performs better for it.”

The Ceiling, Not the Pipeline

The numbers make the contradiction hard to ignore. Women make up 52.3% of the U.S. hospitality workforce, nearly 9 million people, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, yet hold only 28.7% of executive positions, per the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s Diversity Survey . Move up the ladder and the gap widens further: women hold just 22.1% of C-suite roles at major hotel chains, according to Deloitte’s Hospitality Diversity Report , and only about 6-7% of CEO and chair positions industry-wide.

It’s a gap usually blamed on a pipeline problem, not enough women coming up through operations, not enough ready for the C-suite when the seat opens. Wali rejects that explanation outright, “The pipeline was never broken. The ceiling was.”

The data backs him up in an important way: women have actually reached parity at the director level, holding roughly half of those roles. It’s above that level where representation collapses, women lost ground at the managing-director and chief levels between 2022 and 2025. The disruption of the Pandemic, where the hospitality sector was one of the biggest casualties of global lockdowns and travel bans led to an Economic Journal, women were the largest casualties losing their jobs, researchers call this the “ she-cession ” in the hospitality and service sectors.

While hospitality has slowly regained some of its momentum, the ratio of men to women at the partner/principal level improved from 11.4-to-1 to a still-lopsided 6.8-to-1 over the same period, according to Penn State’s hospitality leadership benchmarking. Talented women are in the sector but still struggling to reach leadership positions across all functions.

The data flags what is really going on in a sector that has been vocal on delivering diversity initiatives. A broken pipeline often generates interventions such as training programs, mentorship circles, leadership academies, all of which build capacity for talent development, but without the correct infrastructure will not lead to career progression.A broken ceiling calls for something else entirely: interventions aimed at the people doing the promoting.

Building a Track Record, Not an Initiative

Wali is precise about what actually happened inside his companies, and just as precise about what didn’t. The women now running many senior functions at Practice Assembly did not arrive as executives. “They became executives, across two companies and two decades, because they got real responsibility early and delivered,” he says. “That is not a diversity initiative. That is a track record.” This model of organic growth and career development is not unique to Wali, it’s something championed by leaders in the sector who create opportunities for in house development and career advancement, championed by Mr & Mrs Smith co-founder, Tamara Lohan .

What Changed: The Labor Crisis Forced Honesty

Ask Wali what shifted, and his answer isn’t about culture change or awareness campaigns. It’s about scarcity. “The labor crisis forced honesty,” he says. “When talent got scarce, companies finally started promoting capability instead of pattern matching. Women who had been running hotels in everything but the title started getting the title.”

While many sectors talk about a talent war and mobility challenges, hospitality is still struggling to retain talented individuals. Leisure and hospitality has the highest quit rate of any major U.S. industry, 70-80% annually , roughly three times the 20-25% average elsewhere. Nearly 3 million people left the sector in just the first four months of 2024 alone. Rather than trying to replace a bottomless gap, Wali focused on retaining and promoting internal talent.

The Skills the Old Boys’ Network Never Trained

The second half of Wali’s argument is about why this shift is commercially durable, not just a temporary correction. The business model itself changed underneath the industry. Independent and lifestyle hotels now compete on emotional intelligence, taste, culture and community. He argues, this approach challenges loyalty programs and requires leaders to think differently, “The skills the industry undervalued for decades became the skills that win.”

That argument isn’t abstract for Practice Hospitality. The company has been named a Hotel Management Company to Know by Lodging magazine four years running, with a portfolio that includes The Compton, a 142-room independent hotel built around Bentonville, Arkansas’s cycling culture and outdoor life rather than an imported lifestyle formula. It’s a live case study, Wali argues, in the same instincts his leadership team was hired to have.

Sponsorship, Not Mentorship

Ask Wali how he supports this at an operating level, and he’s dismissive of the usual toolkit. “We do not run a program,” he says. “Programs are what large companies build to apologize for their org charts.” His version: promote from within, pay accordingly, hand people real authority, and get out of the way.

He draws a sharp line between two words that get used interchangeably in most corporate diversity language. “My job is less mentorship than sponsorship,” he says. “Mentorship gives advice. Sponsorship gives opportunity, and opportunity is the only currency that actually moves a career.”

It’s a distinction with teeth: advice is cheap to offer and easy to measure in a program deck. Opportunity requires someone with authority to actually give up control of a decision, a budget, or a seat at the table, and be accountable for the outcome.

The Retention Case Nobody’s Making

There’s a business argument here that goes beyond fairness, and it’s one the industry hasn’t fully connected: hospitality is bleeding people it can’t afford to lose, and the women doing the leaving are being underpaid relative to the men staying. In 2022, women in U.S. hospitality earned about 82 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made, an 18.4% gap, according to BLS data . Within an industry that is already losing employees faster than almost any other sector in the country, Wali’s model is a clear business retention strategy rather than a vague value statement: pay people what they’re worth and give them real authority, and they have far less reason to be part of the exodus. Wali’s business approach is all about walking the talk; his field research is real; “I have slept in thousands of hotels, including 290 in Manhattan, one night each, never repeating a stay. This is not a loyalty strategy, this is field research with a pillow!”.

The Narrator, Not the Protagonist

Wali was explicit, about how he wanted this story told. “The story is about women rising through the ranks to run hospitality companies, outperforming a male-dominated industry, and what that says about where hotels are headed. I am happy to be the narrator, however, women are central to the story.”