I think the time is right for a book on gender equality in tourism. There's been lots written about gender equality and tourism. We've been talking about gender equality in tourism for about 30 years. But women make up more than half the labor force in tourism. 60% of the people that work in tourism are women. But very little has changed for women that work in tourism. They're still undervalued, they're still stereotyped, they still receive less training than men. They're still not promoted. They're still were no nowhere near a balance when it comes to management levels in tourism, let alone board level in tourism. So we go on talking about tourism, and gender in tourism, but gender equality and tourism, but nothing has-- very little has changed. Very, very little indeed has changed. And from all my talking to women that do work in tourism, they are all doing their work in tourism on top of the work that they were doing previous to their job in tourism. We call that the double burden. For many women it's actually a triple burden, because they have duties within the community, religious duties, ceremonial duties. Because the assumption is that the man's out there doing the paid labor. But it's the women that, when they go into earning a wage through tourism, those other jobs don't disappear. And that problem of the double burden is not a new story, but I think that it's something that needs to be reiterated and covered again and again until people start taking a notice. Also I think that with the whole Harvey Weinstein saga, and the Me Too campaign that followed it, I think that people are actually receptive to hearing about gender inequality. I think that now the time is right for a like this, because I think that, for a change, people will actually start listening and hearing. And hopefully that means that we can make a difference. The title of the book, or the subtitle of the book, went through a few iterations before we decided on Beyond Empowerment as the title. And it was partly because of the stories that came out, both from the academic authors and from the stories of women that were working in tourism. And one of the things I asked everybody about was, you know, does tourism empower you? And it became very clear that it was much more than empowerment as understood by what's generally written about if we look, for example, at the sustainable development goals or the UNWTO and what they consider to be gender empowerment. It's very far from the original meaning and understanding of that word. I think it's written within the word empowerment, there's the word power, there. And gender empowerment is actually about changing structures. It's about giving women agency. It's about not being unequal. It's about changing things that make things unequal for women. It's about women having authority. It's about women having autonomy and having the agency to be able to decide for themselves. Whereas if you read what the organizations, world organizations, are saying, and even in the sustainable development goals, it's all about giving women jobs. And just giving a woman a job, particularly in tourism, is not necessarily in the least bit empowering. And so that's why it's beyond empowerment. It's beyond empowerment as understood by how these people write about it. The empowerment that they talk about is empowerment which is diluted to the point of ambiguity. It's very meaningless to talk about empowerment if that empowerment is just about having a job. It doesn't change the structures, it doesn't change patriarchy, it doesn't put women on an equal footing. All it means is that there are more people in the labor force, which means that the costs of labor are held down, which means you have more people to tax if you're a government and cheaper labor costs if you're a corporation. It's nothing about what it does to the structures in society or for those women who are taking part in that work. My journey in tourism went from being a tour operator myself to being the chair of Tourism Concern, which is a charity that looks at human rights and tourism. And when I was there, I started working on water and tourism. And so a lot of the work that I'm known for is the work about water and tourism. But through my work on water in tourism, what I grew to understand is that it's women that are more impacted by the negative consequences of tourism, particularly in relation to water. And hence my need-- I've always said that you need to look at tourism not just as tourism, but tourism and how it fits in with all the other structures and systems within a society. And if you talk about water and tourism, people look at you like, what is the connection between water and tourism? Let alone if you say to them that my area is water, women, and tourism. It's like, what is the connection between water, women, and tourism? But seen from where I look at it, the impacts of tourism are that tourism overuses the water in the community to the extent that women are negatively impacted by tourism. Where I've just been doing research in Labuan Bajo in Indonesia where there's extremely rapid rate of the increase in tourism, without the water system being sorted before that increase in tourism. So we call Labuan Bajo the town of 1,000 jerry cans. And women have to walk queue, carry, save, share, and very importantly, worry constantly about water. Whereas the tourist goes and swims in their pool, goes and has their shower before going in the pool, and after going in the pool, and after they come off the beach, and relaxes and enjoys abundant, nonstop water flowing, while the local women suffer from the consequence of the tourism industry. In Labuan Bajo, the tourism industry can afford to pay far more for water than the local people are able to pay for water. I talk to women in Labuan Bajo. They can't have a job because they have to wait for the water to flow. Water flows down pipes, if you're lucky enough to have piped water, two or three hours a day, two or three times a week. But you don't know which hours on what days. So it can be midnight to 2:00 AM on a Monday, or 4:00 till 6:00 on a Thursday. It's random when the water flows. So the women can't work because they have to be at home waiting for the water. And then when the water flows, they have to fill up as many, many possible containers as they can possibly find, because they don't know when the water's going to flow again next. For other women, it was a matter of, because the costs of water are so great, they we're going into work, it was exploitative labor, it was abusing their rights. They weren't getting maternity pay, they weren't getting holiday pay, they weren't getting sick pay, they weren't getting any of the things that we generally consider to be essential for anybody in the work place. And this was just to cover the costs of water, because the costs of water were so great. And the only medical facility at the time in Labuan Bajo when I was doing the research had no running water. But all water work, whether it's carrying water, washing plates, washing clothes, bathing children, whatever you want to call it, all water work is women's work. And when a woman gets a job in tourism, none of those other jobs get taken by somebody else. They are still women's jobs. And so there is the problem of double burden. And for many of the women it's triple burden, because they're having to walk to collect the water, and also the emotional problems that go along with constantly worrying about whether there's enough water in the house. And saying-- well, you know, one of the quotes from the women is, women can enjoy urinating in a pool of water. We can't urinate because we don't have water. The same family was saying that you can't go out to a meeting because you haven't washed your face, so you miss decision making forums through the lack of water. And that is all because of the tourism industry overusing the water supplies. So what is the link between women, and water, and tourism? It all comes together there, but only if you spotlight on the consequences of tourism for women via the nexus of water. The common threads in the women's stories in my book were mostly about the non-economic empowerment aspects of tourism and empowerment. So the common stories talked about how tourism brought them pride, improved self-esteem, added to their dignity, made them feel better in life. It wasn't about tourism making money. Women didn't concentrate on that. And that wasn't the story that the people wanted to tell. One of the surprising common threads was that women helped women. And I really wasn't expecting that when I started out. But it was common to many of the stories. There's a woman in Ladakh that, when she had succeeded, went on to create a foundation to help other women. In Portugal, the one kind of mass quantitative study in the book looked at managers throughout all the sectors of tourism in Portugal. And it showed where the managers were women, there were more gender equality policies in place within the organization. There was a woman potter in Mexico, and when she got lots of orders, she wanted to help women who were least likely to be able to get employment through traditional routes. So women helping women, women helping disadvantaged women, was a very common story. [INAUDIBLE],, Wicked Dive, when she'd been empowered through tourism, what she wanted was to set up a program for women divers. So yes, that was a surprising common thread that came out through the stories. I suppose an unsurprising thread was that the barriers exist for all the women in all the countries. And they were the same types of barriers, the cultural barriers, patriarchy, over and over again, and how to overcome it, and that change was very slow, and that it was two steps forward, one step back. And that institutional barriers existed that, even in Mexico where theoretically all the policies are in place for gender equality, the way that those policies play out in practice are extremely unfair to women. Except where there's women mayors, where they make things happen for women against the odds. Another example of women helping women. But yes the local, national, and also the international barriers which exist, structural barriers, patriarchy through all layers in society, were common throughout all the stories. Another commonality which came out was, as one of the authors put it, the shadow of sexual assault. That the inequality for women in tourism is very much about exploitation, and that exploitation for some is to the point of physical and sexual harassment. That women either put up with it, or they fear it, or they deal with it in order to keep their work. There's been a recent report by Oxfam covering this in a whole number of different countries. There's also been a report by Unite in the UK looking at the problem. And of course, the problem's not the same for all women. Women are not one category, again. Women have multiple identities. And for migrant women, black women, ethnic minority women, the problems are far greater than for the common ethnicity in any one place. So the issues of intersectionality was a final-- was another commonality in the stories. Towards the end of the book, I wanted to look at what could be done to overcome the problems which we identified throughout the book about gender inequality. So the first and most important thing is that reproductive labor has got to be valued as much as productive labor. So for as long as all the work that women do-- and it is largely women that do it-- in the house, when it's not counted and not considered, there will never be gender equality. When we make this full separation between the work for a company or a corporation, and the work for the family and for society, when one is paid, and counted, and matters according to the way we attribute things, and the other one is just done, uncounted, and unvalued, and doesn't matter, for as long as that takes place, we won't have gender equality. So it's valuing reproductive work. As was shown in the book where men that start doing childcare, all of a sudden, they start valuing it and noticing it. And it's not rocket science for companies to put in place measures which mean that men start taking roles within the family. And there are organizations, there are companies which value when men do flexitime. Why is it only that women get accepted? If you value men that take flexitime, that means that there is a woman who is able to pursue her career and take her career further, because it's the man that's coming in late and leaving early, and taking half time off, and missing important meetings, et cetera, et cetera, which has been what women have been doing. So it's perfectly possible for gender equality measures in terms of valuing reproductive labor to be put in place. And the second thing which is needed is unconscious bias training, because we are all guilty of not treating men and women equally. And it comes-- it starts very, very young. There's been lots of research done that children as young as three are already attributing certain roles to females and certain roles to males. We weren't born like that. That's something which is socially constructed. And we all need to have the training to understand that we have these unconscious biases, and that we have to work against them, because they're within us all the time. And if we don't work against them, we will naturally make an equal choices when it comes to gender when it goes along. In tourism, if you think about it, there's lots of awards given every year for the most sustainable company, the most green company, the best at this company, the best marketing campaign. Where is there an award for the most done for gender equality within a company? If the UNWTO was really serious about gender equality in tourism, then they would start having an award for it. When it was started to be awarded, people would start noticing. People would use their purchasing power and say, well, look, this company's fairer to women. You know, let's think about that. Why doesn't TripAdvisor-- they give green stars, and awards for this, and the best-- why don't they have a box so that we can choose, we can use our purchasing power to make those choices? So companies need to audit, and they need to disclose, and that disclosure needs to be rewarded. And when companies start looking at with in-house and also importantly, their impact, linking back to what I was saying about water, and how that impacts on women. And there are tourism companies that are doing this, so it's not impossible. But it needs to be broadcast. And if destinations competed, can you imagine how well you would do as a destination if you were showing that you had policies in place, practices in place that lead to gender equality? So there's plenty of things that can be done on that front, I think. One of the chapters in the book looks at gender action plans. And so far, there have only been a couple of countries around the world who have made their tourism plan and have deliberately included gender equality within their action plans. If you look at, for example, what Cape Verde is doing, in terms of everything, taking it back to, how will this impact on gender? What is the gendered aspect of that? Which policies need to be put in place? Which action plan changes are required in order not to make the mistakes and fall into the trap of overburdening women or treating women differently than we treat men? And in order to do gender action plans, you need women's voices. And again and again, throughout the book, we had stories of women's voices being excluded. So it's including-- because men just don't think about the way these things will impact on women's lives. So unless you include women-- the classic case in Labuan Bajo with the water, there's no women on the water board, on the water management, so they're not thinking about how these things are going to affect women. That's not tourism, but tourism impacts on it. We could do it in so many different sectors. It's about pavements, it's about routes to school, it's about transportation. They all impact, are impacted by tourism, impact on tourism, and impact in women and men in different ways. And until we have women's voices included, the importance of those things will not be noticed. So hearing women's voices I think is another very important way forward.