Gender gaps in the tourism and hospitality employment in Uganda

Abstract

Gender gaps is the difference between women and men as reflected in political, social, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attributes. According to the global gender gap report (2020), most of the countries have achieved gender equality in educational attainment and Uganda is one of the countries that have aligned her National Development Plan to the Global Agenda 2030 on the Sustainable Development Goals more specifically on the goal 5 of Gender. Gender gaps in Uganda indicates that 34% of women population aged 20-24 old, Adolescent birth rate is 111.4 per 1000 women aged 15-19. As of it is still increasing, we're women are not catered for in terms of employment and education. The gap had widened as records state since 2006 (Klaus,2017). Hospitality industry is mostly dominated by women with a percentage of 55.5% at global level and 70% at regional level (Baum,2013). Despite this, a big number of women are exploited and given low quality jobs with vulnerable conditions which lead to little improvement in the near future. The main objective was to examine ways for closing gender gaps in the hospitality industry and the specific objectives included (i) to determine the level of women participation in managerial positions in hotels compared to men, (ii) to assess the perceptions of employers about employing women in different hospitality positions compared to men and (iii) to identify skills required to enhance women employment opportunities in the hotel industry. Different methods of collecting data were used which included distribution of questionnaires, Key Informant interview. According to the results, there was a low percentage (25%) of women in the managerial positions compared to (75%) of men. Most managers showed a bias on employing women because of some reasons like mentality cultural belief, lack of awareness among women about their rights and religious factors. Most relevant skills that were suggested to enhance women employment include customer care skills and interpersonal skills to be the skills.