Resumo: The lack of gender equity in business management positions is a worldwide phenomenon, as evidenced by the existence of the glass ceiling, a barrier that structurally prevents women from accessing positions of leadership and managerial responsibility. Referring to the tourism sector, it is admitted that there has been progress on this issue, however, there are still huge inequalities, stating that much of the employment in hotels is linked to stereotypes and female roles, being in turn precarious and with lower wages than their counterparts. Due to the above, institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) join efforts through regulations, programs and guidelines that promote gender equality in the workplace; efforts that are still insufficient due to social and cultural factors. The objective of this paper is to construct the social ethos of women workers in the hotel sector, in order to identify and understand their feelings and thoughts regarding gender performativity and its influence on access to managerial positions. The understanding of meanings is supported by the interpretation of narratives that address the gender perspective and women's participation in managerial positions, using as a theoretical framework the content analysis proposed by Lalive d'Epinay and the discourse analysis, based on the concept of ethos as part of the sociocultural identity constructed by female employees of lodging companies in the City of Puebla, Mexico; this from a three-dimensional model (meta-text) in the temporal, social and spatial spheres. Narrative is used as a technique, induced by means of in-depth interviews applied to informants of the hotel sector. The results obtained are presented from the perspective of qualitative sociology, taking as a reference the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz in which it is emphasized that the participation of women in positions of high responsibility is conditioned to performative, formative and structural aspects. It is concluded that within the social organization there is a typification of the gender perspective that is offered as concomitant to normalized social structures called traditional ethos and the one explained as a reality that needs to be institutionalized from a liberating ethos, both present simultaneously.
