City Lodge Hotels belongs to the 30% Club, a prestigious group of companies worldwide that has achieved at least 30% representation of women on its board and in the C-suite.
The groups commitment to gender diversity is evident with women making up:
- 45% of the board
- 66% of the C-suite
- 39% of senior managers
- 64% of middle managers
- 62% of junior managers
- 61% of the workforce overall
As one of the women in City Lodge Hotels C-suite, Chief Operating Officer (COO) Lindiwe Sangweni-Siddo shares her career milestones and personal achievements that have shaped her career.
Personal influence on professional pathSangweni-Siddo attributes her passion for hospitality to her upbringing, shaped by her parents life in exile during apartheid. I may not have been interested in hospitality had it not been for the life my parents lived. We lived a life in exile due to the apartheid regime making it unpalatable to raise a family, and our life was spent travelling from a very early age, starting with Eswatini (Swaziland), where I was born, to Holland, Zambia, Kenya and later Sweden, Switzerland and the USA.
Living in Zambia during the height of the liberation struggle, she says her parents were deeply involved in the African National Congress (ANC). Their home became a safe house for ANC leadership, including Oliver Tambo. During the 1976 youth uprisings, their home also became a refuge for young people fleeing the apartheid regime and this experience, described in her book, fostered Sangweni-Siddos love for hospitality.
