Posted on March 17, 2026
If you look at the events industry long enough, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
Women are everywhere in it; planning it, running it, shaping it,and holding it together on the days it threatens to fall apart.
They are the florists, the coordinators, the general managers, the CFOs, the ones at the whiteboard, and the ones on the floor at 6am making sure every chair is exactly where it should be. Ours is an industry that has always run on female hands, female vision, and female persistence, even when the nameplate on the door said something else entirely.
Every year at InEvent, we mark International Women’s Month by celebrating the women worth following right now, fifty voices building the future of events in real time. But this year, we wanted to do something different. Something that earns its place in the conversation not just by naming greatness, but by tracing its origin.
This year, we’re walking down memory lane.
We’re going back to the women who didn’t have a blueprint and drew one anyway. The ones who turned a villa into a vision, a banquet department into a global standard, a locked door into a pitch competition. These are wome who have sat in CFO chairs at the world’s largest hotel companies and the ones who built their own hotel brands from the ground up when the financing kept falling through.
We’re telling the story of the women who carved a path into an industry that didn’t always have space for them and the women who are still carving, right now, today.
1. Béatrice de Rothschild (1864–1934) Pioneer of the curated event experience.
On a narrow finger of land jutting into the Mediterranean at Cap Ferrat, a woman was building something the world had no name for yet.
It was 1907. Béatrice de Rothschild had acquired a 17-acre plot on the French Riviera and set about constructing a rose-tinted Venetian villa surrounded by nine themed gardens (French, Spanish, Japanese, Florentine, Provençal, exotic, stone, rose, and Sèvres) each one a distinct sensory world. She named it Villa Île-de-France, after an ocean liner that had inspired her, and dressed the thirty gardeners who maintained the grounds in sailor uniforms, complete with red pom-poms on their berets.
She would not know it yet, but this was event design in the making, a century before the term ever existed.
Béatrice understood something that the industry would spend the next hundred years trying to articulate: that a guest’s experience begins the moment they arrive, and that every detail is a form of communication. She hosted legendary evenings on her grounds, drawing Europe’s finest artists, musicians, and thinkers. A poet who attended one such summer night wrote of watching Anna Pavlova dance to Chopin nocturnes in moonlit gardens that swept down to the sea.
When she died in 1934, Béatrice bequeathed the villa and its entire collection to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The property still stands. The gardens are classified by France’s Ministry of Culture as among the Remarkable Gardens of France.
The modern event experience has many mothers. Béatrice de Rothschild is one of the first.
2. Alice Statler (1880s–1969) former Chairman of the Board of Hotels Statler Corp.
If Béatrice built the feeling, then Alice Statler built the business to teach the world how to replicate it.
Alice Seidler had worked as personal secretary to Ellsworth Milton Statler, the self-made hotel magnate who had built one of America’s most powerful hotel chains, for eight years before she became his wife, six days before his death in 1928. In his will, Ellsworth named her Chairman of the Board of Hotels Statler Corp. and left her the estate. She was 45 years old. What she did next quietly reshaped an entire industry.
Over the next 26 years, Alice Statler expanded the chain she had inherited, adding new Statler Hotels in Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Hartford, and Dallas. She guided the company through the Depression and the Second World War and into the post-war boom, growing it to nearly double its original size. In 1954, she brokered the sale of the entire Statler portfolio to Conrad Hilton for $111 million. She was 71 years old!
But her most enduring contribution was not the deal. It was the education.
Alice Statler became one of the Hotel School’s most committed benefactors — overseeing more than $10 million in giving to what is now the Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. She laid the cornerstone for Statler Hall in 1949 and attended Hotel Ezra Cornell, the school’s annual student-run hotel, as its official opener for more than twenty years.
Through the Statler Foundation, she channelled resources into the formal training of hotel workers and managers at a time when the industry had no such infrastructure. She professionalised the discipline of running them, including the banquet and events departments that had long been treated as afterthoughts.
The hotel industry she helped build and formalise was worth billions by then. Women like Alice were not handed a seat at the table, nor did she have an official title for what she was building at the time. Instead, she inherited the table, and she made it larger.
Decades later, the industry had a shape. It had departments, job titles and a pipeline. What it didn’t have was enough space, not for women who looked a certain way, came from outside the traditional track, or had the audacity to build something entirely their own. So some of them (like the women we’d look at now) stopped waiting for space and simply created theirs.
3. Sheila Johnson – Founder & CEO, Salamander Collection
In 2002, Sheila Johnson walked away from BET, the network she had co-founded with her then-husband in 1979, built into the first African American-owned company to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, and sold to Viacom for $3 billion, with her share of the proceeds, a divorce, and a question: what now?
The answer was a 340-acre horse farm on the edge of Middleburg, Virginia. She bought the land from the estate of Pamela Harriman. She had a vision for a luxury resort and named the company Salamander after the mythical creature said to survive fire, and founded it in 2005.
What followed was a decade of fire.
The town of Middleburg didn’t want a resort. Residents filed objections. Public hearings dragged on for years. The project grew from a proposed 40-room inn to a 168-room resort, and with every expansion came fresh opposition. One local official called it the most divisive issue the community had faced in decades. The approval came through the town council by a single vote — four to three.
She would later describe the experience as passing a kidney stone. Even after approval, construction halted for 18 months during the recession. She received racist hate mail. Her longtime bank, despite her net worth running into the hundreds of millions, refused to take her seriously as a borrower. She ended up funding the resort largely herself.
Salamander Resort & Spa opened in August 2013. It earned Forbes Five-Star status, making Sheila Johnson the only African American woman to wholly own a Forbes Five-Star resort. The property built with her own photography on the walls, furniture she sourced personally in France, and a spa pool modelled after the one at her farm down the road was entirely, unmistakably hers.
The Salamander Collection now spans eight properties across the US and Caribbean, including Hotel Bennett in Charleston, Half Moon in Jamaica, and Aurora Anguilla. USA Today has named it the Best Luxury Hotel Brand two years running.
She has described hospitality as the happiest chapter of her career. Given what it took to get there, that says everything.
4. Tracy Prigmore Founder, She Has a Deal | Managing Partner, TLTsolutions
Tracy Prigmore spent 25 years as a healthcare executive, holding senior leadership roles at three of the largest health systems in the country before she pivoted to real estate. She founded TLTsolutions in 1996 and spent the years that followed acquiring and repositioning 19 properties across multiple states. By 2022, she had launched the firm’s first income fund, focused on hotel properties, and built a multi-million dollar portfolio spanning four states.
She knew the industry from the inside. She also knew what it felt like to be the only woman in the room and to have the door close before she’d finished walking through it.
So in 2019, she opened a new door entirely. She founded She Has a Deal.
The mission was to create pathways to hotel ownership and development for women. Not mentorship programmes, or networking events but actual pathways like capital, knowledge, access, and a pitch competition that puts real funding behind women-led hotel projects at a time when that pipeline barely existed.
In 2021, LODGING Magazine named Tracy its Person of the Year. The International Hospitality Institute recognised her as one of the 25 Most Influential Women and 25 Most Inspirational Executives in Hospitality. She has since co-led the acquisition of a 40-acre vineyard estate in California’s Amador County, complete with a winery, tasting room, and luxury inn.
5. Peggy Berg Founder, Castell Project (now an AHLA Foundation initiative)
Peggy Berg was the first female employee elected by the PKF partnership, one of the hotel industry’s most respected advisory and consulting firms. That was her entry point into a world with very few women at the top. She spent the next thirty years watching the numbers barely move.
In 1989, she founded The Highland Group, Hotel Investment Advisors, building it into one of the industry’s most respected research and consulting practices. She owned and operated hotels, including a Comfort Inn and a Hampton Inn in Atlanta that she bought, renovated, repositioned, and managed herself. She sat on advisory boards at Michigan State, Penn State, and Georgia State’s hospitality schools. She knew the data cold, and it was damning.
Women represented more than half of the hospitality workforce but a fraction of its leadership. The C-suite, the boardroom, the ownership tier, the numbers told the same story year after year. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
So in 2017, Peggy founded the Castell Project with one stated goal: women in more than one of every three positions across all levels of leadership and ownership in the hospitality industry. It was a benchmark that could be measured and held to.
Castell launched the Women in Hospitality Industry Leadership report, an annual benchmark that named the gap and tracked it. It ran the Castell Leadership Program for rising female executives. It built Castell College to get hospitality students thinking about leadership before they were even in the industry. It created the Women Speakers in Hospitality initiative to put more women on conference stages because visibility at the podium shapes who gets considered for the boardroom.
In 2022, the Castell Project became an AHLA Foundation initiative, its work formally absorbed into the infrastructure of the industry’s largest association. Peggy stepped back from the chair but the work clearly didn’t stop.
The 2025 Peggy Berg Castell Award, named in her honour and awarded annually to principled women leaders who exemplify change in the hospitality industry, was awarded this year to Leeny Oberg, the outgoing CFO of Marriott International. There is no greater confirmation that the work was worth it than having your name become the award.
And then something shifted. Women didn’t just found companies, they ran the biggest ones in the world. Here are some of these women:
6. Kathleen Taylor Former President & CEO, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
Kathleen Taylor joined Four Seasons in 1989 as Corporate Counsel. She came from a law firm, and she was definitely not a hotelier. She thought she’d stay three or four years.
She stayed for 24 years.
She moved through every significant role the company had: General Counsel, Head of Corporate Planning, President of Worldwide Business Operations, COO, before becoming CEO in 2010, handpicked by founder Isadore Sharp as the person to lead the company he had spent his life building. When she walked into that office, Four Seasons operated in 37 countries. During her tenure, the business quadrupled in size, forged strategic partnerships with more than 100 hotel owners and developers, and cemented its position as the gold standard of luxury hospitality worldwide.
She was also the first woman to be named Corporate Hotelier of the World.
That the company she led set the global benchmark for high-end event experiences, and the standard against which every ballroom, every gala, every corporate summit in a luxury property is still measured, is inseparable from her leadership.
Four Seasons under Taylor, codified what world-class service actually meant, and exported that standard to 38 countries. She left the company in 2013, and went on to become the first woman to chair the board of a major Canadian bank. The hospitality industry gave her an ALIS Lifetime Achievement Award, and York University made her its Chancellor.
She grew up in a small town in Ontario, where, she has said, she was told women became teachers, nurses, or nuns. She became none of those things and instead ran one of the most admired companies in the world.
7. Vera Manoukian Chief Operating Officer, Sonesta International Hotels
Vera Manoukian, like Kathleen, did not plan to work in hotels. She had a chemistry degree and an MBA. She was looking for a job that combined science and marketing when she walked past a help-wanted sign in front of a hotel in Bedford, New Hampshire.
She walked in. She never left.
By 29, she was a General Manager, one of the first female GMs in the Starwood system. She went on to become Area Managing Director across the W Hotels in New York, then SVP of Operations for Starwood’s entire East Region, and finally Global Brand Head at Hilton, overseeing nearly 600 properties in 95 countries. Three decades in, during the height of the pandemic, when most of the industry was in hibernation, she became COO of Sonesta, one of the fastest-growing hotel companies in the United States, with over 1,200 locations.
What she built at Sonesta is important to the events ecosystem, specifically because she made professional-grade operations the standard across a portfolio spanning budget, mid-scale, and full-service hotels.
The assumption in this industry has long been that serious event infrastructure belongs to the luxury tier. Vera Manoukian has spent a career challenging that assumption and under her leadership, approximately 45% of Sonesta’s general managers are women, more than doubling representation from just a few years prior.
She has often spoken about a fallacy in hospitality: that you can be either a great leader or a present parent, but not both. She has spent her career proving otherwise, and made sure the culture she built reflects that.
8. Inge Huijbrechts Chief Sustainability & Security Officer, Radisson Hotel Group
In 2019, Inge Huijbrechts did something no hotel company had ever done. She made every meeting and event across Radisson’s global portfolio 100% carbon neutral.
And trust me? That was the beginning.
By 2021, Radisson had gone further, offsetting twice the CO2 emissions from all events and meetings across its EMEA portfolio, making it the first hotel chain in the world to make its events and meetings carbon negative. In 2025, the group opened its first two verified net-zero hotels in Manchester and Oslo, meeting 2040 targets a decade ahead of schedule, and powered entirely by renewable energy, with low-carbon menus and minimal-waste operations.
Inge Huijbrechts has led Radisson’s Responsible Business programme for over twelve years. She co-launched Hotel Sustainability Basics with the World Travel and Tourism Council — a shared framework now adopted by more than 5,000 hotels worldwide — and placed Radisson 37th on Sustainability Magazine’s Top 250 Most Sustainable Companies globally. She sits on the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance Senior Advisory Board and chairs the US State Department’s OSAC Hotel and Lodging Sector Committee.
The events industry has always had a carbon problem, which has become a major topic of conversation at every gathering today. Flights, freight, food, and energy in a single large conference can leave a footprint that most organisations would be ashamed to calculate. Inge Huijbrechts is the person who decided that wasn’t inevitable and built the systems to prove it. In 2022, she was named one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Global Hospitality and one of the global Top 100 Women in Sustainability.
9. Leeny Oberg Former CFO & EVP of Development, Marriott International
Leeny Oberg joined Marriott in 1999. She became CFO in 2016, taking the financial helm of the world’s largest hotel company. In 2023, she was additionally appointed EVP of Development, leading the strategic growth of the entire global lodging portfolio.
In the decade following her appointment as CFO, Marriott’s stock outperformed the S&P 500.
She navigated the Starwood acquisition which was reportedly the largest hotel merger in history, absorbing 30 brands and hundreds of thousands of rooms and then, almost immediately, the COVID-19 pandemic. The company that emerged from both intact, positioned for growth, and with its culture preserved, is in significant part a testament to her stewardship. J.W. Marriott Jr., Chairman Emeritus, said as much publicly when her retirement was announced.
She retired on March 31, 2026, after 26 years with the company.
In October 2025, she received the Peggy Berg Castell Award and named in honour of the woman who founded the Castell Project, specifically because the data on women in hospitality leadership was damning. The award is given to principled women leaders who exemplify change. That Leeny Oberg received it in her final months at Marriott is a fitting close to a career spent at the intersection of financial leadership and institutional culture-building.
10. Jen Mason – CFO, Marriott International
Jen Mason joined Marriott in 1992. She has been there for 33 years.
She has held roles across treasury, finance, and strategy, and most recently served as CFO of Marriott’s largest segment, the US and Canada division, before being named CFO of the entire company, succeeding Leeny Oberg, effective with the filing of Marriott’s 2025 annual report.
Her elevation tells a specific story, and it’s worth naming it plainly: this is what a pipeline looks like. Not a recruitment process that went out looking for a woman. Not a symbolic appointment. A 33-year career, built role by role inside the same institution, producing someone who was simply the most qualified person for the job. The fact that she is a woman is significant. The fact that it is unremarkable is the point.
Kathleen Taylor became the first woman to receive the Corporate Hotelier of the World Award. Leeny Oberg spent a decade as CFO of the world’s largest hotel company. Jen Mason succeeds her. The thread running from Alice Statler’s cornerstone to Jen Mason’s appointment is not a coincidence. It is a record.
The Events Industry Always Remembers
We started with Béatrice de Rothschild, who is standing in a garden she designed herself in 1907. All nine of them, each themed, each deliberate, each a decision made by a woman who understood that event experience goes beyond mere decoration. It is architecture in the finest form.
At that point, nobody had a name for it. Nobody knew how to call it event design. Nobody called it anything. There was no job title, no industry association, no benchmark report. There was just a woman with a vision for how a room should feel, and the refusal to settle for anything less.
That refusal to stick to the barest minimum, or the norm as set by societal standards, runs from Béatrice’s gardens to Alice Statler’s lecture halls, to Sheila Johnson’s 25 public hearings to Peggy Berg’s damning spreadsheet.
It also runs through Tracy Prigmore, standing in front of another locked door and deciding to build her own, through Kathleen Taylor flying between 30 hotels a year to hold a global standard together, through Vera Manoukian, walking past a help-wanted sign in New Hampshire and never really leaving.
It runs through Inge Huijbrechts rewriting of what an eco-conscious event looks like for 5,000 hotels at once, through Leeny Oberg steering the world’s largest hotel company through a pandemic and a historic merger without losing either its financial footing or its culture. It arrives today, at Jen Mason’s desk, where a 33-year career at Marriott has produced a long line of women who continue to shape the room, even till the point of reading this piece.
This is one continuous story of women refusing to be incidental to an industry they built.
The rooms where deals get made. The ballrooms where movements get launched. The conference spaces where industries rethink themselves. At 6 am, the event floors were, and someone was making sure every chair was exactly where it should be.
Women built those rooms, designed the feeling inside them, ran the companies that set the standards, funded the training, wrote the policies, and stood at the whiteboards. And when the doors were closed to them, some went and built entirely new rooms.
We remember Béatrice. We remember Alice. We will remember all of them.
But the industry has a long memory problem when it comes to women. The names don’t always make it into the histories. The contributions get absorbed into the institution without attribution. The feeling outlasts the woman who created it, unnamed.
So this is our ask.
Think about the room that shaped you in this industry. The mentor who made the introduction. The manager who gave you the job when you weren’t quite ready. The founder whose platform you built your career on. The executive who sat across from you and said yes when everyone else said not yet.
Who built your room?
Tag her. Name her. Tell the story. Comment it, post it, send it to her directly if she’s still around to receive it. The most powerful thing we can do this International Women’s Month is refuse to let the women who made this industry go uncredited for one more year.
About the Author / Adedoyin
