Gender, work, tourism and higher education in Bali

Abstract

The UNWTO (2019) declares education a key element of women's empowerment. This article attempts to explore this issue, asking if higher education in tourism can promote women's empowerment in Balinese society. Our research, conducted from 2019 to 2021, subscribes to a post-colonial perspective. We build an intercultural approach based on the collaboration between French and Balinese researchers. We adopt a structuralist constructivist approach and employ a mixed method. Our study confirms that access to tourism higher education is a vector for women's empowerment in Bali. Yet this structural change is still highly contingent on the support of men. There is a growing gap between administrative rules, tending toward gender equality, and traditional community in which women remain under men's authority.