Balancing the Scales
By the end of International Women’s Day week, the internet starts to feel a little loud....
Panels. Campaigns. Corporate Instagram posts discovering feminism for 24 hours. Well-meaning graphics about empowerment that quietly disappear again the next day.
And yet, somewhere inside all that noise, there are still moments that feel real.
Earlier this week I invited 22 women from across hospitality to join me for dinner at Lumen People. There was no panel, no microphone, no program. Just a long table and a simple idea: to pause and acknowledge the women who quietly hold this industry together.
Hospitality is full of people who make things feel effortless. Restaurants that run smoothly. Teams that stay calm in chaos. Spaces that feel warm and welcoming the moment you walk through the door.
What people don’t always see is how much of that emotional labour is carried by women.
The chef steadying a kitchen when service starts to wobble.
The floor manager reading the room before anyone else notices something’s off.
The owner running payroll, comforting a staff member going through a breakup and making sure the kitchen hand gets fed before midnight.
So much of the culture people celebrate in hospitality is built on that kind of care.
And most of the time, it happens quietly.
This year’s IWD theme was “Balance the Scales.”
It made me think about what that might actually look like in an industry like ours. Not a panel discussion or a campaign slogan, but something tangible.
Maybe it looks like giving women the space to speak without interruption.
Maybe it looks like acknowledging the work that often goes unseen.
Maybe its allowing women from across the indsturty to organically connect and share lived experiences,
Or maybe sometimes it simply looks like turning the table around and letting the people who normally do the hosting be the ones looked after.
That was the intention behind the dinner.
To cook for the people who spend their lives feeding everyone else.
To create a room where they could exhale for a moment.
There were chefs, venue owners, managers, sommeliers and writers. Some had known each other for years, others were meeting for the first time. Within fifteen minutes the room was loud with conversation, laughter and the kind of easy familiarity that only happens when people recognise something of themselves in the people around them.
That’s the thing about hospitality.
For all its chaos, it has a strange ability to build community.
And women have always been at the centre of that.
If there’s one thing I’m taking away from this week, it’s that the scales rarely balance themselves. They shift when people make the choice to move them, even in small ways.
A dinner.
A thank you.
A moment of recognition.
Sometimes that’s where change begins.
And if hospitality teaches us anything, it’s that the people who spend their lives holding everyone else up deserve to be held too.