We report on Let’s Sit at the Table, an ongoing series of seven (so far) roundtables launched in partnership by the Dubai based social enterprise Evolvin’ Women and The Retreat Palm Dubai MGallery by Sofitel in September 2017. The roundtables were designed to explore best practices in the Gulf region driving women within the hospitality industry to senior leadership positions. Here we focus on one of the roundtables, which took place on February 21st, 2018 and was centered on the topic of empowering women in hospitality through education. The roundtable explored how to encourage women and girls to take up positions in fields where they lack representation, such as in the culinary arts. The roundtable was attended by ten experts in the areas of education and hospitality and revolved around several questions developed in line with the UN’s Women Empowerment Principles (http://www.weprinciples.org/). To encourage further research we first briefly describe the problem as acknowledged in the academic literature and as experienced by one social enterprise in Dubai.

Keywords: gender segregation, empowerment, WEPs, hospitality education,