Editorial

Gender-inclusive tourism: An evolving landscape and future research directions

Magdalena P. Swart

Copyright: © 2025. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Introduction

The global awareness of gender equality in tourism has increased in recent years, with a renewed focus on the empowerment of women in industry. This can be attributed to the emphasis of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on Gender equality (SDG 5) as defined by Alarcón and Cole (2019):

Gender equality in tourism refers to the full and equal participation of women as agents and decision-makers, ensuring their rights and opportunities are recognised and addressed, thereby … Contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals. (p. 904)

Although the transformative power of gender equality is known, current projections indicate that global gender equality targets are unlikely to be achieved by 2030, especially in relation to the empowerment of women and girls (UN 2024). It is, therefore, necessary to unpack the nuances associated with the evolving gender equality landscape and future directions to foster equal gender participation in tourism.

Evolving gender equality landscape

It was in the mid-2000s when Spenceley and Goodwin (2007) created an awareness of gender equality research in tourism. Before 2015, academic research on tourism gender studies received little attention, with a relatively low number of publications per year. However, since the establishment of the SDGs in 2015, scholars have had a renewed appetite to investigate aspects impacting the empowerment of women in tourism and gender equality. Leading scholars include Carlos M.M. Costa (Portugal), Albert N. Kimbu (United Kingdom and South Africa) and Adeola Ogechi (Nigeria and Rwanda), among others. Studies related to gender equality in Africa only gained momentum in 2020 and have become a popular topic of investigation, especially among African scholars. Furthermore, there has been exponential growth in tourism gender studies, as Scopus reported a record number of 73 publications in 2024 (author’s data from Scopus 2007–2024). Research in this field focuses on the interrelationships between gender equality with either (1) other gender-related aspects (such as relationships, disparity, status, roles, empowerment and issues) or (2) sustainability (such as development, employment, women, coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19] and the SDGs). This has informed the implementation of gender mainstream policies by governments and private organisations. However, these studies overlooked the importance of teaching, research and practical implications of gender in tourism, a gap that was addressed in the Routledge Handbook on Gender in Tourism (eds. Swart et al. 2024). Besides the progress made in research and civil society on gender equality in tourism, challenges persist in areas such as occupational segregation, wage disparities and gender-based violence (GBV), to name a few, which require further investigation in future research projects, especially on how these impacts women in the sector.

Future research directions

Ideally, future research in tourism must include a gender-awareness perspective for the advancement of inclusiveness, intersectionality and gender-transformative approaches in the sector. Women constitute nearly 54% of the tourism workforce (UN Tourism 2024), and, although progress was made to empower women, significant challenges remain in ensuring equitable opportunities in the workplace. Multi-sectorial entities need to invest more in research to accommodate diverse discussions on how the empowerment of women in tourism is understood and how the proposed solutions can be applied in practice. Developmental and mentorship initiatives are needed to stimulate women’s entrepreneurship in the developing regions of the Global South. Gender mainstreaming needs to remain a strategic approach by governments and the private sector to foster social justice and sustainable development (Yang et al. 2024). Tourism challenges and opportunities of remote work and digital nomadism from a gendered perspective remain unexplored (Zerva, Heute & Segovia-Pérez 2023). Furthermore, the psychological aspects related to work-life balance and well-being from a gendered perspective can be investigated through Neurosciences. Management at institutions of higher learning must be cognisant of the physical and mental well-being of academics, researchers and students and take proactive measures to mitigate the adverse effects of a metric-driven academic culture.

The digital gender gap (Pérez-Amaral et al. 2021) and how this is influenced by technology and innovation can shed light on how gender equality can be advanced through artificial intelligence (AI) and social media. Decolonised feminist ethics and eco-feminist approaches can be mobilised for a shift towards equality and humanity. Masculinity research can give insights into GBV, especially in a tourism context. Fair employment through equal gender representation and the development of safe workspaces for women still have many unanswered solutions. Feminist epistemologies and ontologies that go beyond a specific language provide a scope for more developing researchers to explore action research on the empowerment of women and gender equality in tourism. Lastly, research in this field can be advanced through indigenous and non-Western knowledge and critical tourism scholarship through the application of the intersectionality theory. Furthermore, strategies are needed for guidelines on the distribution of social welfare and to end the exploitation of tourism workers under neoliberal governance (Yang et al. 2024).

Through this reflection, more needs to be done to achieve SDG 5 by 2030, as summarised in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1: Evolving gender equality research landscape and future research directions.

References