Skift Take
Supervisors who don't send women on business trips, in a misguided effort to avoid dealing with women's safety issues, are doing their companies a disservice by suppressing that talent. Companies that tackle that duty of care head-on are playing with a full deck.
Maiden Voyage provides educational and support services to female business travelers as well as consulting for the travel companies hoping to capture that market. The company said in its Women in Business Travel Report 2016 that 31.4 percent of female business travelers globally have encountered sexual harassment while traveling.
Risks also extend to theft, assault, rape, and kidnapping. Then, with that on her mind, making constant micro-calculations about her surroundings, the female business traveler must do what what she actually came to do: meet a client, make a presentation, close a deal.
Some women struggle to even land professional opportunities that require travel because male supervisors know the safety risks and don’t want to deal with them, much less pay more for a safer hotel or taxis to avoid walking alone at night.
Maiden Voyage — established in 2008 and headquartered in Leeds, England with over 11,000 members worldwide — wants to level the playing field with a new set of video courses on five subjects: pre-planning and packing, safe ground transportation, hotel safety, intercultural awareness, and safe meetings and leisure time.
These 20-minute modules are interactive with maps, audio testimonials, and trivia questions. What percentage of women reported feeling vulnerable when traveling on public transport? 67 percent, according to research conducted by Maiden Voyage.
The company also inspects hotels and certifies those that meet certain minimum safety requirements, and offers training for hotel staff. Maiden Voyage has 70 "global ambassadors" who aid in researching and ranking safety at individual hotels.
These measures aren't just about making travelers more comfortable — they're also a legal obligation to protect a growing group of women. Research from the Global Business Travel Association shows that 37 percent of U.S. business travelers in 2016 were female, a slight increase from 35 percent in 2013.
"If something goes wrong, the company will need to be able to show in a trial that they took adequate measures to safeguard their travelers," Maiden Voyage CEO Carolyn Pearson told Skift. "That would be briefings and training and an audit trail of what they did to safeguard that trip, or maybe even a risk assessment. We know from the potential of the market that we've entered that probably 95 percent of people are failing on that already."
Skift spoke with Pearson to find out how companies can support
