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.
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 womenOf course, sexual harassment is rampant not just in the hospitality sector but in many industries. A 2020 U.K.