T
oday, Vivien Sirotkin is at the top of the corporate
ladder. As director of hotel operations at Q Hotels she
is one of a relatively small number of UK female board
directors (only 12% of UK company directorships
are occupied by women and that percentage drops
to just 6% in the hospitality sector, according to People 1st).
During a glittering career of high achievements she was the
first woman to manage a five-star hotel in Europe (Gleneagles
1988-1991), the general manager of Cliveden (2001-2) and
vice-president of Guinness Enterprise Holdings USA (1991-2).
The secret of her success? She insists that much of it is
down to her housekeeping background: “A start in housekeeping
is as good a start as you’ll ever get in hotels. Cleaning rooms is
hard work and if you can motivate and manage a housekeeping
team, then you can probably motivate anyone.” Vivien’s view
wouldn’t be so surprising were it not for housekeeping’s
persistently lowly ‘Cinderella’ status within the industry.
While Vivien was finishing her degree in hotel and
catering administration at Surrey University, an international
hotel company made a recruitment visit. With blatant
discrimination they said they were only looking for one male
trainee (“I was very upset about that,” she remembers) but
added that there was a trainee opportunity in housekeeping