Gender, Power, and Career Progression in Nigeria’s Five-Star Hotel Sector: A Feminist Institutional Analysis

This study analyses the gendered power dynamics and structural barriers shaping women's career progression in Nigeria's five-star hotel sector through a feminist institutional analysis framework, contributing a theoretically grounded understanding of gender inequality reproduction in African luxury hospitality organisations. Women constitute over 60 percent of entry-level workers in Nigerian luxury hotels yet are consistently underrepresented in general management and executive leadership roles. Existing studies treat this disparity as an individual capability gap rather than a structural institutional phenomenon. A qualitative feminist research design is adopted with data generated through 46 in-depth interviews with female employees at various career stages, female and male senior managers, and human resource directors across 14 five-star hotels in Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt. Intersectional analysis examines how gender intersects with marital status, educational background, and ethnicity in shaping career outcomes. Feminist institutionalism is applied to examine how formal hotel policies, informal workplace cultures, and industry-wide gender norms combine to reproduce occupational segregation and leadership exclusion. Findings reveal that shift work structures, the socialisation of management roles as masculine, marital status penalties imposed informally on female employees, and networks of male sponsorship from which women are systematically excluded constitute the primary institutional mechanisms of gender inequality. The study develops a feminist institutional model of gender inequality in Nigerian luxury hospitality and generates recommendations for gender transformative human resource policies, women's leadership development programmes, and industry-wide gender equity commitments. Keywords: gender inequality, feminist institutionalism, hotel careers, Nigeria, leadership