As a young McDonald’s employee in the 1990s, Rhonda Floyd returned from maternity leave to find that the promotion she had been expecting had been given to her temporary replacement — a man. It was the sort of blow that women in many industries up and down the country can identify with, one that many, too, have had to suffer in silence.

Ms Floyd, however, did not. She decided to set up a group for women at the company to support each other’s career development.

“There were all the usual jokes — it was going to be a knitting club, we’d all be reading Hello magazine or burning our bras,” she said. It was anything but, yet although the fast-food chain has made significant progress on equal opportunities, it has further to go, according to Ms Floyd, a senior customer services manager with the company. “McDonald’s,” she said, “is very male-dominated.”

McDonald’s is not alone. In the leisure and hospitality industries, the progress of women trails that of other sectors. Although 58 per cent of the two million-strong workforce in the UK is female, the numbers plummet at senior levels. The proportion of middle managers is 40 per cent, senior managers 20 per cent. At board level, the figure is only 6 per cent, compared with about 12 per cent nationally. In a customer-focused industry in which 83 per cent of purchasing decisions are made by women, the lack of representation at the top surely does not make good business sense.

A campaign by People 1st, the Government’s sector skills council for leisure, hospitality, travel and tourism, wants to change this. Women 1st was launched last week by Cherie Blair to encourage companies to develop and promote women. Although individual industries have networks, such as Ladies in Pubs and the Association of Women Travel Executives, there was nothing across the sector.

At the launch Ms Blair spoke of her “personal affection” for the travel industry: her mother supported the family working as a travel manager for the Co-op after her father had walked out. “The leisure industry is a really important part of our economy,” Ms Blair said. “The culture of hospitality is a natural fit for many women. But it’s clear from the statistics that something about the way these businesses are organised at the moment is not allowing women to break through.”

She draws parallels with her own career as a barrister. “When I first started in law in 1976, the bar wasn’t a career for a girl,” she said. “We don’t have the same problems getting in now, but maintaining and advancing careers while trying to have a family is still difficult.”

Ms Blair sees “huge numbers” of informal barriers in the leisure sector. “There’s a natural desire to look for people who fit in, people who are ‘like me’ — male, middle-class with stay-at-home-wives,” she said.

The £114 billion-a-year leisure and hospitality sector is a key target for growth, particularly with a decade of sporting events planned for the UK — the 2012 Olympic Games, the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the 2015 Rugby World Cup and, possibly, the football World Cup in 2018. The Government wants to create 200,000 more jobs in the sector by 2017, 69,000 of them managers.

Brian Wisdom, the chief executive of People 1st, said: “This industry has a massive leadership deficit. We should be looking to [women] to close that gap.”

Sharon Glancy, business solutions director at People 1st, said that women were disadvantaged by the irregular hours demanded by hotels or travel operators. “The main barrier in our sector is that the hours are not the traditional nine to five — job roles can be 24/7 in some sectors. It is difficult to carry out senior positions part time.” Since 2004 the number of women in management positions in the sector has dropped from 49 per cent to 46 per cent, the number of female chefs from 50 per cent to 40 per cent. One reason is that as the recession hits part-time working hardest: with more women in part-time roles, they are more at risk, Ms Glancy said.

Taking a break to have children can be fatal for career development: a third of women returning to the leisure industry after childbirth take a downward step in their careers. On a personal level, it is a battle that Ms Floyd believes that she has won. Many others would like to say the same.

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