Hospitality Design - July 2010 - 75

think if I was a male, even if I thought that would have the best outcome for the team, I’d probably not say it because of the way it would be taken.”

who somehow do it.” “I think that’s what begs the question of is there a glass ceiling? If there is, it’s of your own making,” says Degen. “If you’re the kind of person like we are, there is no glass ceiling for you because you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done and to pursue what it is that you’re after. The ones who have the glass ceilings are the ones sitting at their desks not promoting themselves, wondering why they’re not being promoted. It’s up to every individual to break out of it.”

Carefully Curating
“I think women have to curate their lives more carefully than men, because there are pulls. Men don’t get pregnant. So there are nine months and a few months afterward, but I just kept on working and I curated my time. I decided what time I wanted to spend with my children,” says Clodagh, principal of her New York-based design firm. “We welcome kids at the studio here just as the same as we welcome dogs. Somebody comes in with a baby and wants to work for a while, no problem.” “You’re always negotiating; whether you are negotiating childcare or negotiating just your life or negotiating your boundaries. I think it’s a constant negotiation because what we all do is at a very intense level,” says McMahon. “We all have to travel much further than we had to travel before.”

Speak Up
“You have to be able to promote yourself,” says Helen Jorgensen, vice president, design and procurement, Host Hotels & Resorts. “And it took me a long time to get that. You just think you’re doing this great job, this great design, and people are going to recognize it. Whatever you’re doing you have to be promoting it.” “In corporate America in our industry, the hotel industry, it’s a male dominated industry, it’s a tough

“

Now if they look at me and say, ‘that bitch’ I don’t care because I know where I’m coming from…

“If you think about the leaders in residential

industry, why we ever got into it in the first place is beyond me, but I’ve been in it practically my entire life and I love it,” says Slora. “But it is a male dominated you promote yourself and unless you get out there and

design, in Dallas here, they’re mostly women. And that’s different. I think that with hospitality what makes it more difficult is the travel,” says Wilson, who is working internationally in pretty much every market, including 19 hotels in Mecca. “For me, I think it would be really hard to be a great mother and a great business leader and not feel guilty about neglecting one or the other.” “The reason I think there’s not a glass ceiling in our neck of the woods is, not everybody wants to do this,” says Dolly Ross, COO at Los Angeles-based Design Group Carl Ross. “When it gets to the real nuts and bolts of it, if we were to ask around any of our offices would you be willing to work Sunday, Saturday, Friday, are you willing to get up at 5 a.m. to do that conference call, are you willing to do the conference call in the middle of your kid’s soccer game, and the answers would be no, no, no. So the few of us who’ve decided to somehow do this are the ones

organization, and like Helen [Jorgensen] said, unless you make the meetings and you talk and you network with women in the industry and in your own organization and figure out how you can do this then you will sit at that desk. I created my position years ago and I keep pushing forward through it.” “Unless the women raise their voices to the same level as the men’s voices they do not get heard,” says Clodagh, noting a personal breakthrough at a Speak Up program about 16 years ago. “I really felt if I was pushing myself forward they were looking at me and thinking, ‘that bitch’. Now I’ve pushed myself to the right level, and if they look at me and say, ‘that bitch’ I don’t care because I know where I’m coming from, I know what I want to convey, and that is good design.”

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July 2010

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - July 2010