Women empowerment in a traditional masculine industry: Tourism in context

Abstract

Tourism is considered as an essential source of generating employment, reducing poverty, and empowering women. Most of the tourism initiatives targeting poverty reduction primarily focus on providing income opportunities for women that only enhance their economic empowerment. Nevertheless, this does not usually lead to make overall development. This is attributed to the normative gender roles, cultural complexities, and power inequities that exist in societies. Additionally, most of the earlier research studies on tourism, poverty reduction, and women empowerment are also based on economic factors. Contrarily, limited studies are focused on non-economic factors. These non-economic factors are social, political, and psychological components that are essentially important for women's overall empowerment. Thus, these factors need to be studied comprehensively as they may hinder women’s participation in tourism activities. Having taken this background as the underlying problem of study, this paper is an attempt to highlight the social and political barriers impeding women empowerment and investigate about tourism development in the socio-political contexts affecting women, especially in rural areas, using case studies pertaining to different tourism destinations.