by Dr Kate Neely
Director of International Programs
RoundTrip Foundatiom
Mao Zedong famously said that “women hold up half the sky”. Mao didn’t say / It doesn’t specify that women only hold up the low value parts of the sky – there are no ‘low value’ parts, the sky is a whole, the clouds as necessary as the sun, the moon as necessary as the air. All equally essential.
In the global travel and tourism sector, it seems however that while women hold up even more than half the sector, their work is considered ‘low value’. Women are often the unseen workers, cleaners and cooks, rather than the very visible and highly valued guides and drivers. They get lower wages and are less likely to receive tips from tourists.
This year International Women’s Day (March 8) has a theme of ‘break the bias’. It’s a good opportunity to ask ourselves how WE can break the bias? Since I have already mentioned driving, let’s start there. When I was growing up there was a lot of doubt that women were as good at driving as men were. Now, it is well known in Australia that women are great drivers, and they are sought out by companies to drive buses, trams, trains and even giant mining trucks. Yet in many places that I have travelled, women are much less likely than men are to have a driver licence. This means that they can’t even apply for jobs as drivers. How do we break that bias?
We can provide opportunities for more women to learn to drive and do vehicle maintenance. We can deliberately break the gender stereotype of the ‘male driver, female passenger’ when we hire a car or motorbike (my husband loves sitting on the back of my motor scooter). We can ask tour operators to provide gender balanced crews on tours – so if the tour guide is a man, then the driver needs to be a woman. We can make sure that women joining the workforce in driving positions are safe – installing alarms in taxis so that women drivers can call for assistance might help, teaching men not to abuse women would help even more! Big charity and UN organisations working in developing countries often have fleets of cars and drivers, and in my experience, those drivers are usually men. We can call on those organisations to create better gender balance in their employment practices.
While driving may seem a pretty ‘niche’ aspect of tourism and gender bias, my point is that there are many small things that add up over time to create the situation where women feel bias against them. Often the biases against women are unconscious or there is a broader cultural or systemic issue that we don’t notice. If the owner of a tour company was asked why she doesn’t have female drivers, she might say that women don’t apply so they obviously aren’t interested. The reality may be that young women are not given the opportunity to learn to drive and so they can’t apply for those positions.
I am sure you can think of other situations when you have noticed that women are excluded (either consciously or unconsciously) from certain activities. Expectations of dress can make some activities almost impossible for women – try climbing a coconut tree in a sari for example. Expectations around childcare can also make it difficult for women to enter the workforce on a full-time basis. Some amazing women are breaking these boundaries, becoming tour guides and managing hotels and safari companies, but there are still too few of them. There is a lot work still to do, but a first step is for us all as individuals to keep our eyes open for bias, to question it and to challenge it. Only then can we to “break the bias”
For more on International Womens Day 2022
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