The Castell Project is an Atlanta-based nonprofit initiative created in 2017 with the goal of tracking and monitoring the status of women within hospitality and, more importantly, creating programming to bump those numbers up and hold companies accountable.
As the project does the heavy lifting of measuring the status of women within the hospitality industry, HOTELS caught up with the nonprofit’s founder and President Peggy Berg regarding larger questions of how racial bias can affect women’s ability to climb the corporate ladder.
HOTELS: Where does racial diversity fit into this conversation?
Peggy Berg: We’re all human, we all have biases. The entire executive team in the company has biases, we as women have biases. It’s how we move efficiently and effectively through our lives, but sometimes those biases don’t serve us well and the bias around women, the bias around people of color, is not serving us well. Now, it’s hard to identify in yourself but we all have it, myself included. It’s hard to know how to address it with other people when you encounter it but it’s something that we have to address to move this particular needle. So that’s something that both the company and the diverse people in it have to think about and thoughtfully work on.
H: One of the theories of thought within the broader #MeToo movement is that this is a moment where women of privilege, i.e. white women, should be taking a step down and letting more women of color step up so that their voices are heard. Is there room for something like this within a hotel company’s strategy?
PB: So that has an implicit assumption that there are only so many spots for women. So either you have a white woman or you have a woman of color but you can’t have both.
H: Well, it sometimes feels like that, doesn’t it?
PB: But that’s wrong. So I think it’s very dangerous for any of us to let that implicit assumption go unchallenged. I think what happens, what should happen, is you evaluate people on what they’re delivering and what they can bring to the both company and you.
H: Right, yes. But, while that’s the rational way of thinking, like you said previously, there have been biases in place that have been keeping women out of higher positions for years and then there are also biases that have been keeping women and people of color out of higher positions for years.
PB: Yes.
H: So then how do company leaders break the cycle of people hiring people who look and act just like they do?
PB: If you look around your group, whatever group it is, whether it’s the group in the C-suite or it’s the group of general managers or it’s the group of food and beverage directors, whatever it is, if you look around that group and you see a really strong concentration of one color, one age, one school: Oh, wow, you’ve got a problem.
H: So it sounds like this is a wakeup call?
PB: And it’s hard. So whoever you are, what happens in your gut when you run into one of these biases? When you start paying attention to it, you can feel it. Literally, it’s a gut feeling. You can feel it and when you feel that, it’s a very difficult thing to challenge yourself and say, “Oh, I know that feeling. That means my bias is making my decision for me. Do I want to let that happen?”
So it is hard. I know that my biases are kicking in because that is when I stand up from my desk and go get a cookie. Because I will do anything, especially if it involves a cookie, if it saves me from having to do the uncomfortable thing of going against my bias.
H: (Laughs) Love that. We should all eat more cookies is really the moral of this.
PB: I eat a lot of cookies and then I come back and I say, “All right, I ate the cookie. I am now going to overcome my bias and do what I was supposed to do before I went to get the cookie.”