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Nancy Mendelson and Emily Kanders Goldfischer are the co-founders of hertelier, a global platform dedicated to inspiring, educating and motivating women at every stage of their hospitality journey. Through smart, conversation-sparking content, hertelier supports women in the hotel industry with insights on leadership, business skills, work-life balance, industry news and networking opportunities.
Here, they share why the industry must move beyond performative appreciation to fix the systemic barriers—from rigid leadership definitions to a lack of flexibility—that prevent talented women from reaching the C-suite.
—Interview by Jennifer Glatt, edited by Bianca Prieto
(Image courtesy of hertelier)
Was there a specific moment during your time in corporate PR where you realized the industry’s polished exterior didn’t match the internal reality of women in hospitality?
For both of us, it was the contrast that made it so clear. We came from Loews Hotels, where Jonathan Tisch was way ahead of his time. In the early 2000s, Loews had near gender equality in the C-suite and women running major hotels. That showed us what was possible when women were visible and genuinely supported in leadership.
But we also saw how unusual that was. Nancy saw it firsthand while producing the NYU hospitality investment conference, where it was often difficult to find women in senior hospitality roles to put on panels. The executive planning committee included women, but on the main stage, female representation lagged badly. When you looked out at the audience, it was mostly men, too.
Then, when Emily moved to London in 2010 and began covering luxury travel as a journalist, the same question kept coming up: where are all the women? They were doing the work, but not being quoted, profiled or centered in the wider industry conversation. During the pandemic, that gap became even harder to ignore, and that is when hertelier was born.
What does it actually look like for a hotel to move beyond “celebrating” women in March and start designing operations that support their longevity in the industry all year long?
It starts with recognizing that this is not just a visibility problem. It is a systems problem.
Through more than 800 articles and interviews at hertelier, and through our leadership survey with Forbes Travel Guide, we have seen the same barriers surface again and again: gendered expectations of leadership, limited flexibility for family life and bias in promotion and hiring. These are not small issues. They reflect systemic friction in how leadership is defined, evaluated and rewarded.
So the answer is not another March panel. It is better systems: stronger mentorship and sponsorship, more transparency around promotions, more flexibility and a broader definition of what leadership can look like. At the same time, women are also pushing themselves to speak up more, go for stretch roles and challenge the conditioning that has taught so many of us to stay small or wait to be chosen. That matters too. But we have to be careful not to frame this as something women alone need to fix. The real opportunity is to change both the structure and the story so leadership in hospitality becomes more strategic, human and sustainable.
For the independent hotelier looking to honor the women who shaped their specific property or neighborhood, where should they start looking for those stories that don’t usually make it into the history books?
In hospitality, history tends to remember the owners, developers and architects. But the women who gave a hotel its character were often the ones creating the guest experience, building community, holding teams together and shaping the identity of a place over time.
So start there. Talk to longtime staff, former employees, neighborhood residents and local historians. Look through old photographs, community papers and local archives. Women’s history does not always live in formal records. Sometimes it is tucked into the memory of a housekeeper who worked there for 30 years or a front office leader who knew every returning guest. Those are often the stories most worth telling.
As female representation in the C-suite hits a plateau, what are the traditional leadership traits we’ve all been taught to value that you think women in hospitality should feel empowered to leave behind?
Hospitality has long rewarded a leadership style that is always on, highly polished and often performative. For years, leadership was defined largely through a male model, with traits coded as traditionally masculine treated as the gold standard.
Women should feel empowered to leave behind the pressure to fit that mold. Some of the strongest leaders in this industry are empathetic, collaborative, commercially sharp and deeply good with people. Those are not soft qualities. In hospitality, they are real strengths. The bigger challenge is for the industry itself to broaden its definition of leadership.
hertelier is on a mission to spark conversation. What is the one question you’d challenge the industry to ask itself this March to bridge the gap between “appreciation” and actual progress for women?
What is stopping you from bridging the gap?
Women enter hospitality in strong numbers, yet too many disappear from the leadership pipeline along the way. If the industry really wants to move beyond celebration, it has to ask harder questions about what is pushing women out, what is holding them back and what is making leadership feel unsustainable in the first place.
