The tourism gender gap and its potential impact on the development of the emerging countries
- PDF / 498,251 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 220 Views
The tourism gender gap and its potential impact on the development of the emerging countries Azzurra Rinaldi1 · Irene Salerno2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
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. Keywords Tourism · Development · Communities · Women
1 Introduction The last year has been an incredibly successful year for tourism: in 2017, international tourist arrivals grew by 7.0%, showing their peak in seven years. While Europe remains the world leader in terms of international tourist arrivals, some emerging markets such as Brazil and the Russian Federation strongly recovered in demand. Even the international tourism receipts increased: if adjusted for exchange rate fluctuations and inflation, they grew by * Azzurra Rinaldi [email protected] Irene Salerno [email protected] 1
Department of Law and Economics, University of Rome Unitelma Sapienza, Viale Regina Elena, 295, 00161 Rome, Italy
2
Department of Juridical, Filosofical and Economic Studies, University of Rome Sapienza, Piazza Aldo Moro, 5, 00161 Rome, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Rinaldi, I. Salerno
4.9% in real terms and reached US$ 1340 billion in 2017. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, in 2017 tourism accounted for 313 million jobs, or 9.9% of total employment. The tourist phenomenon is becoming richer, thanks to new types of tourist offer: enotourism, festivals, adventurous journeys (Rinaldi and Sergio 2018). During the last decades, tourism has demonstrated its potential for creating jobs, yet few attention has been paid to the unequal ways in which it may benefit men and women, with particular reference to the developing world. Our paper aims at providing an overview of the potential of tourism on the development of emerging countries by empowering local women and supporting gender equality, with a special focus on a case study in Himachal Pradesh, in India.
Data Loading...
