International Journal of Commerce and Management Research

Authors
Jyoti Peshave, Dr. Kirti Gupta

Abstract
The Pune Hospitality industry has overall low representation of women in the work force. Currently there are 14.6% women employed in the Hospitality industry in Pune. However, despite of increase in the number of women employed in the Hospitality industry over the past decade, they still constitute only 14.6 % of the work force in the Pune city.This clearly shows that the Hospitality industry continues to be male dominated. It is found that women do confront a significant number of challenges, beginning with difficulties in managing the long working hours/ irregular working hours and the work life balance to rising to the senior management position in the organisation’s hierarchy. In this context, this paper presents a review of the literature on the current status of women in the Hospitality industry; in particular, it looks into various challenges they face in their career progression like social, cultural, organizational or other individual factors that hinders their growth. The literature review showed that women career progression is mainly seen to be hindered because of various challenges like conflicts with family responsibilities, child care responsibilities, long/ irregular working hours, strong male dominated culture, etc. In addition to the above other factors like lack of fairness in the pay, fairness in promotions, Role models and mentors, support systems at workplace, commuting to the work place, lack of family support, mentor and role models are also few of the powerful determinants. Certain women friendly policies like flexible timings, part time work options, crèche facility at work place, grievance redressal cell, counselling cell for women, training programmes, succession planning programmes, Provision of Role models and mentors, pick up and drop facility and incentives and perks are few of the suggestions that can be provided to them to assist them and encourage them to make the workplace a better environment.