Female Business Travelers Demand Equality From Their Employers
Photo Credit: Carolyn Pearson, CEO of Maiden Voyage. The company just released a set of educational modules to help level the playing field for female business travelers. Maiden Voyage
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
