The benefits of women in tourism

At Responsible Travel – and more personally, as keen travellers – we believe the benefits of women in tourism are manifold, for tourists as well as local communities. Across the globe, women are seen as keepers of culture. They are the cooks, the weavers, the growers and the homemakers; the gateway to traditions and stories. By involving these women as tour guides, as the designers of itineraries, as storytellers – we are able to view a destination from a new perspective.

Samrawit Moges is the founder and Managing Director of our supplier Travel Ethiopia, the first tour operator in Ethiopia to employ permanent female guides. She is also one of the founders of WEG group (Women Entrepreneur Group): “Tourists very much enjoy having a female guide. It makes a difference because she is able to talk about the community, about women, about the culture. It is very much related to women; wherever they go they see women working, and this is extremely well explained by the female guides rather than the males. When a female guide explains, for example, about early marriage – a negative traditional practice – as a woman, she is able to explain it better than the male. You know when they visit homes, when they visit villages, they always encounter the women.”

Annie Young, founder of our supplier Ecocircuitos Panama, works with many local indigenous communities. She discusses the benefits of being a female-run company, which employs and works closely with women: “From my perspective, we can be more sensitive to what the community needs; we don’t want to do things for show. We don’t want to say we take tourists to different communities; we want tourists to have an experience. We want them to be able to sit with Linda or Nacida and talk and discuss different ways of life. I took two Spanish women the other day to an Emberá community. We spent the whole day there, we cooked with them; it’s not just that we sit and witness, we participate. A woman was talking to us about botany and the gardens because the Spanish women were very interested in medicinal plants. For me it was fantastic – but for them, when we finished the tour they were hugging them! And that says to be more than words – it was a real experience. One said to me, ‘I’m going to start cooking fish differently from now on’ because she saw how they were cooking the fish. There is a connection.”

Vicki Brown, Responsible Travel’s writer and editor, saw a different side of Colombia on a recent trip: “I was assigned a female guide for a hike into the Andes. It was a very rural, traditional area with quite clearly defined gender roles in general, and a woman growing up here would have had quite different experiences to a man. Maruja, was a superb storyteller – she plucked medicinal herbs, explained which plants were edible, which stored water, and gave me plant “tattoos” that the indigenous Muisca women used to have on their bodies. She revealed the secrets of a stone pool where women used to give birth, surrounded by nature, and in a landscape and culture dominated by the myths of the goddess Pachamama – the Native American Mother Earth – it seemed very appropriate to be guided by a woman, deep into “Pachamama’s belly.” Maruja wasn’t necessarily a better guide than her male counterparts might have been – but I really appreciated the alternative perspective that she was able to offer, even more so as a woman myself.”

Ridhi Patel, founder of our supplier Volunteering Journeys, speaks about why she employs women: “I have seen a drastic change in confidence levels of some of my staff members, from being very dependent on their husbands to now being independent and fairly confident women. There’s definitely a change in attitude because of this, and because they are working with other women who come from abroad. There’s a change as well in terms of the way that they talk, the way that they can open up about certain things and discuss things with our volunteers, and their progress in terms of education and confidence.”