The tourism gender gap and its potential impact on the development of the emerging countries

Abstract

Tourism offers both incredible opportunities and huge challenges for gender equality. During the last decades, tourism grew almost steadily, and, since it is a labour intensive sector, even job creation increased, but not equally for men and women, as it happened in every industry. Tourism sector is actually recognized as an important contributor to help creating new job opportunities to women. Indeed, globally, in the tourism industry 46% of the workforce are women, but they suffer from both horizontal and vertical gender segregation of the labour market. In the emerging countries, the situation is even worse. Our paper focuses on bringing out the current condition of women in the tourism sector, particularly in the emerging countries and it presents, with a case study located in India, what happens to women and their communities when the role of women in tourism is supported. In India, indeed, also thanks to organizations such as the Mahila Mandals, women have been supported in their entrance in the job market in the tourism sector and this led to an improvement in their income generation capacity, in their self-esteem and in their bargaining power within the family.