Female Bartenders Still Struggle to Overcome Sexism at Work

Sarah, a student in her early 20s, has worked at the same bar and restaurant in west London for almost a year. “This is a good place to work,” she says during her lunch break at 3 p.m. while eating fish and chips with a pint of draft soda. Previously, Sarah worked at a fast-paced budget cocktail bar, which she describes as much harsher, physically and mentally. By comparison, the new restaurant “pays well, and the crowd is less rowdy. They don’t touch you, but you’ll get a comment or two. It’s sad that that is the better option.”

Sarah’s new job also has better management, she says, driven, she thinks, by the job market. “Especially now, when everyone’s hiring,” she says, “if something happened, [management] would listen.”

In her previous workplaces, managers took advantage of female workers by assigning them to more rowdy tables hoping for higher tips. On one occasion, Sarah’s coworker stressed her inability to complain about the deputy manager, who was consistently making lewd jokes, as she did not want to lose the position. On top of that, bartenders had to deal with customers making unwanted sexual comments.

Sarah’s experience in the hospitality industry is hardly an anomaly — particularly in bartending, where alcohol and long shifts, usually late into the night, increase the risks women face at work. In 2018, the hospitality union Unite performed a wide-scale study on discrimination, finding that of those surveyed, 90% of women experienced sexual harassment at work.

Of course, sexual harassment is rampant not just in the hospitality sector but in many industries. A 2020 U.K.-based study found that one in three women experience harassment in the workplace. Unwanted advances are increasingly likely for those in positions with little experience, women who are younger, and those in casual rather than permanent jobs — the same demographic most likely to end up in bartending. The correlation is clear: The workers most discriminated against are women who are young, less wealthy, and at their more vulnerable.

While the gender split of the bartending industry varies by country — with the U.S. having a near equal split of men and women — the U.K.’s bar scene is heavily male-dominated; one in three bartenders is female. Male bartenders are more likely to be paid better than their female coworkers and hold positions of power, just as in the rest of the hospitality sector. Such a power imbalance affects wage discrepancies among employed men and women and the potential career paths for female bartenders nationwide.

One might ask, then, why would any woman willingly participate in an industry that is unwelcoming? The bartending industry provides a lot of jobs — 1 million jobs in the U.K. in 2020 — and offers many openings for jobs that don’t require previous experience. Hospitality jobs are also predominantly temporary, with high turnover rates and employees who are mostly young and part-time. When considering the difference between a temporary job in bartending or other forms of hospitality, factors such as wage, schedule, and proximity to home are far more important than rates of sexual harassment.

Understanding the hospitality industry as one where unwanted attention is assumed to be normal paints a bleak picture. But there’s hope for improvement: Following a rise of studies examining sexual harassment in hospitality, The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and UKHospitality developed a zero-tolerance policy individual companies must adopt by 2022. Individual franchises, such as Greene King nationwide and Fullers in Southeast England, have enacted their own example policies following controversies and lawsuits in the late 2010s. Both chains have been involved in lawsuits regarding former employees’ experiences with sexual assault. A 2019 case involving Greene King Services Limited and a former female employee made national news for its account of both harassment and management neglect to respond. The trial resulted in a dues payment of £5,000 to the victim. Franchise bars and pubs, which may have many of these cases among their branches, cost the brand their reputation and financial status.

The efficacy of such policies is another matter entirely. To expect a working culture reliant on male dominance, and a similar customer culture, to change immediately is unrealistic. Though both must progress for the sake of women in the industry, improving governmental and sector-led harassment policies is a reliable first step. As such policies are slowly enacted post-COVID, there will be higher levels of support for female employees industry-wide.