Good afternoon, everybody. And thank you for coming to my presentation. Gender Equality and Tourism-- Beyond Empowerment is the title of a book that I'm producing with CABI. The book interrogates the notion of empowerment and asks how much empowerment tourism actually brings women who work in tourism across the world. Gender empowerment is a central premise of international development, whether it's Save the Children or GTZ or DFID, they all talk about the need for gender empowerment-- the empowerment of women. But what actually do they mean by that empowerment when they talk about the empowerment of women? If we look at the work of the UNWTO-- the United Nations World Tourism Organization-- they say that tourism can empower women in multiple ways and unlock their potential. But what do they mean by that empowerment? And which women and under what circumstances are women empowered by tourism? In international development if we talk about women's empowerment, then we're talking about women having the capacity where they've previously not had the capacity-- the transformation of gender relations as they exist. But is giving women a job in tourism going to do that? Or is it just providing more labor supply to those businesses that want to reduce costs by supplying more labor, and therefore, keeping the costs down? More cheap labor for companies to exploit could be the same thing as empowerment under those terms of empowerment for women, as we can see with what the UN development goal number five talks about when they talk about empowering women. Again, they talk about expanding economic growth. They talk about the potential to increase national growth rates. It's about economic growth, whist others of us are talking about the need for degrowth, they're still talking about it in terms of economic expansion. But how much is economic expansion to do with empowerment? Empowerment means women gaining agency, having control over their lives, being able to initiate action, being respected and looked up to, being able to govern what they do, having roles in public life. These are all things that-- the power in the empowerment, to be listened to and looked up to. But how much tourism work gives women a voice? How many women who work in tourism are listened to or looked up to indeed? And when we read those UN sustainable development goals, they talk about women as if one blanket term serves all women. But women all have multiple forms of identity-- women of color, different socioeconomic status. Women have an identity based around their age. And all of those-- sexuality-- they all shape the power and the complex ways in which women are empowered or indeed disempowered. So what, in my book, I found from the many stories, both by the academics that wrote them-- articles-- but also the women that shared their stories is that yes, tourism does bring economic empowerment to some women in some places. And for many, this is really very, very important-- this economic freedom. The freedom to leave an abusive husband, the freedom to educate daughters equally as sons, the freedom to make decisions because you've got your own money, and you can spend it how you wish. Those are all incredibly important. But there's two important buts. Firstly, when it comes to tourism destinations, the prices always go up. So with women working in tourism, very often they're only compensating for the extra costs of living because they're living in a tourism destination. And secondly, because they're doing their wage labor in tourism where they're earning money from a tourism job on top of the work that they were already doing. Women throughout the world do the vast majority of what we call reproductive labor-- the labor with which we reproduce society-- having their babies, feeding them, cooking the food, washing them up, cleaning the kids, cleaning the dishes, cleaning the house, taking the children to school, picking them up from school, managing and organizing the household. Women were doing all of that work before the tourism job came along. The tourism job doesn't take that other work away. It adds to that work. The stories in the book point to quite a lot of individual, or sometimes referred to a psychological, empowerment. So women felt greater self-worth. They had stories about improved dignity. They had greater self-esteem and increased confidence because of their tourism work. Many of them learned new skills. Sari learned to dive. Another woman learned rafting. Many of them learned to speak English. So they increased their personal abilities. And that gave them greater confidence, which on a personal level was empowering for them. There was also stories of overcoming isolation because of tourism, either because of meeting with tourists and therefore not feeling so isolated when they lived in isolated places, or because of groups that came together to organize tourism. And the collectiveness helped them overcome previous feelings of isolation. And that linked through to an increased social empowerment-- the empowerment of groups, the group identity, the increased social capital of having a network, and the feeling of togetherness-- that between us we can move things on. So that form of collective empowerment also existed within the stories. But the true empowerment, the power bit empowerment, the political empowerment, was far rarer. The opportunities to gain agency did exist. And it was lovely to hear the stories of women who felt that they had increased their agency because of tourism. They had done that despite the structural barriers which exist in each and every society that's written about in the book. And each one were taking very, very small steps in what is a very slow revolution towards gender equality. But they saw tourism as a way to gain a little, tiny, weeny bit more power than they had had previously. And thus, tourism could be said to being empowering. So I can share with you a bit of my own research which is from Labuan Bajo in eastern Indonesia, which combines research about women in tourism together with water, to try and demonstrate how important it is to look beyond just the economics of the actual tourism. And although we can say in Labuan Bajo that tourism competes with local people for water supplies, that is not just in Labuan Bajo. This is not an exceptional case. I've done research in Bali and published it-- in Corella, in Goa, in Costa Rica, in Zanzibar-- all over the world where you have a hot, sunny place which is water stressed. And then you add tourism. There is a competition for the water between the local people and the tourists. And tourists generally use a lot more water than local people. Even in the best cases it's 10 to one-- ten times as much water used by tourists as by local people. And in some of the extreme cases it's as much as 100 times as much water used by tourists than local people. So Labuan Bajo is not an exception from that point of view. But Labuan Bajo is perhaps an exception because even before the tourists started going there it was called the town of 1,000 jerry cans because the water supply to the town before tourism was very difficult. And tourism has just compounded the problem. So water flows-- if you-- about 25% of the population are linked to the municipal water supply. And water flows down those pipes for a couple of hours a day, a couple of times a week. But you don't know which hours on which day it's going to flow. So when I talk to women there about tourism work, many of them would like to have been able to work in tourism. But because they were waiting for water they couldn't work in tourism. They couldn't work in anything. They felt very restricted because they had to stay there to wait for the water to flow. So when the water flows down the pipes, they have to fill as many possible receptacles as they can find to save the water until next time the water flows because they don't know when it's going to be. And I met people who had been waiting for two weeks, and the water still hadn't flowed again. And they were eking out the very, very last of their saved water supplies. For other women that weren't connected to the municipal supplies and couldn't wait for it, they were dependent on either walking and collecting it or on buying it. And many of them felt the need to work-- and tourism was where they would get the work-- in order to cover the costs of buying water. But water is very expensive. Of course, the hotels can afford to pay more for the water than the local people can. And this pushes up the price of water beyond the affordability for many, and they are forced to walk to seek water. For all the women, the burden of tourism work was on top of their water work. And for all of them it was on top of worrying about water. They all talked about this constant worry and the constant struggle for water. So you can't just view tourism alone. You've got to understand that tourism impacts on other aspects of people's lives. And quite drastically so, to the point of abusing human rights in many cases. So the overuse of water in Labuan Bajo meant that the women were burdened rather than empowered. The jobs weren't empowering them. They were adding a burden to their lives. In Labuan Bajo, but in very many places across the world, patriarchy dictates that all domestic work is women's work. And for domestic work you can actually substitute the word water in very many cases, whether it's bathing children, washing dishes, cleaning clothes, cleaning houses-- it's all domestic work, and it all involves water. And it's a woman's domain. So by tourism competing with the local people for the water supplies, it's pushing up the price of water. And as I say, in some cases it's abusing human rights. And the worst case example I found was a woman who spent 30% of her income on water, when the United Nations state that it shouldn't be more than 3%. Migrants, however-- rich people that came to town with capital-- could afford not only to pay somebody to carry out the domestic work, but could also afford the very expensive water supplies. So they, having their tourism businesses, yes, they were empowered through tourism. And there are other exceptions as well. [INAUDIBLE],, my research assistant on this project, whose story is in the book, she left Flores. She learned to speak English through the tourism industry. She then became my research assistant. She worked for a development NGO working in Flores. From that she's been seconded and paid for to go on a sustainability workshop in Australia and a tourism workshop in the US. So she's traveled. Now, she's listened to. People have-- she has authority within town. People think, wow, you know, [INAUDIBLE] must be something because she's managed to go to all these places. And that is through tourism. So yes, some people are empowered through tourism. But for most women it's about stress. It's about worry. And it also affects their relations with one another. If you've constantly got to ask your neighbors for water, you feel indebted to your neighbors. And you get left with a feeling of shame because you're always having to ask for something. Water was the cause of fights between couples. And a lot of gender-based violence between couples has started as an argument over water. So there are a lot of further knock-on effects going on. The women felt powerless. They couldn't control the tourists. The local authority can't control the tourists. Tourism is developing in Labuan Bajo at a rate of not far quicker than Labuan Bajo can adapt to the tourist demand. We know from examples in Europe, Dubrovnik, Venice, Barcelona, that it's very difficult to turn off the tourist taps once they start coming. The ability to control tourism is not in the hands of those women. They don't have the ability to control tourism. They don't have an ability to control water. So they're powerless. Tourism has taken power from them, rather than giving power to them. And of course, the struggles that the women felt were not felt equally by all members of Labuan Bajo society. Partly, it's down to occupation. It's a difference between the haves and the have-nots, the economically able and the less able, and those that could afford to buy water versus those that couldn't afford to buy water. But the picture is actually far more complicated than that. I broke my respondents down by ethnicity. And there's a distinct difference between migrants from the islands, the Bugis, Bajo, and Bima migrants, who are Islamic, over the Catholic mountain migrants from Manggarai. And your chances of getting a job in tourism and/or in government are highly affected by your ethnicity. Life stage also affected how women were empowered or disempowered because of tourism and water. Women with very young children struggled far more than women who had children. If you have children, you can send your daughters to go and collect water, to go and queue for water, to go and carry water. However, if you've got a very young child, not only is your washing pile far greater because of all the things that babies do in their clothes, but also because you got to carry the kid as well as the washing to the washing place. And then you've got to carry the kid and the wet washing back from the washing place. How, when you've got a little toddler toddling along-- I don't want to walk any further, mommy. How do you pick them up when you're already struggling to carry enough water home? And the other phase in life which was particularly difficult was for widows who were still responsible for children and other relatives but didn't have anybody else to share the burden of work with. And finally, purely serendipitous because of the nature of the geology of Labuan Bajo, your proximity to the water supply. So you can see there, one family who were digging a pit to put their rubbish in hit water. And they hit an underground river that's got such force in it they can fill four water trucks at a time, which they then can distribute around the town and sell to hotels and anybody with the money with which to buy water. They also very nicely provide one free tank to anybody who lives locally because they want to have good neighborly relations. And, as they point out, it was a coincidental free resource that they just bumped into by accident, completely unlike the women in the bottom picture who are the furthest I met from a water source and seriously struggle with any water supply at all. And that's purely down to the geology of the area. So I hope, that by way of conclusion, you can see the tourism is not just purely, you can have jobs, you get money, you're economically empowered, therefore you have more power. The picture is far more complicated. And when you only look at economic power, you're hollowing out the power from empowerment. Having a job in tourism is often a double burden or a triple burden on women, and it doesn't empower them. For as long as women's labor that was being done before wage labor-- the labor of producing the next generation, the labor of keeping households going and doing all the water work which that involves-- until that's counted and until that's valued, tourism work will go on reinforcing gender inequality, rather than reducing it. And this lack of control and powerlessness that I found for these women in Labuan Bajo is quite the reverse of what the UNWTO and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals suggest about tourism work empowering women. Just giving women a job in tourism is not empowering women. We have to see tourism as part of a far more complicated picture than that. And the barriers that women faced-- patriarchy, institutional barriers, cultural barriers-- were felt by all the women in all the countries all around the world that my book covers. At local levels, national levels, and indeed, at international levels, these institutional barriers prevent women from claiming their equality. So the point that I'm making is that just giving women jobs in tourism is not empowering them. You've got to understand tourism is part of a much broader system. And you've got to look at other aspects of women's lives before you can say that tourism jobs empower women. The book looked at the barriers that prevent women getting equality and from all the countries-- and there's very many countries that the book covers. The same barriers occurred again and again-- the cultural barriers, the patriarchal values, and the institutional barriers. And those institutional barriers work at local, national, and international levels, which act as a stumbling block for women and an additional challenge for women to try and overcome the inequalities which they find in their lives. One of the loveliest things that came out of writing the book, which I wasn't necessarily expecting when I set about writing it, was that the women wanted to say what power they had got from tourism-- that they had used tourism to take power, albeit in very tiny ways. They had used the power of tourism to transform their lives-- and not only their lives. But when they were empowered through tourism they always wanted to empower other women through tourism. And the book is full of stories of women who then go on to help other women. [INAUDIBLE],, who's here in this picture, works for a dive operator who insisted that they train women to become dive guides because she understood the importance of the equality and the empowerment that she'd got out of tourism. And she's just one of a number of stories in the book like that. Women help women was a lovely part of the story, which I was quite unaware of before I wrote the book. So the book has also got lots of, where do we go from here? How do we make things move forward? How do we improve gender equality in tourism, through tourism, by tourism? And the final concluding chapter is full of practical real world suggestions of how we can move it all on. And you'll find further information also on equality and tourism's website, www.equalityintourism.org. Thank you very much.