These women from Erdek in Turkey offered to host Equality in Tourism's first conference on gender and tourism. Very sadly, that was in 2016, and the political events that took place in Turkey in 2016 meant that that whole event had to be canceled. But for these women here, what they said is rural tourism is a necessity. Rural tourism is not about empowering. No, rural tourism is a necessity for us. It's a necessity to ensure our democracy, to ensure our traditions are kept, and to ensure that we can maintain the livelihoods the way we want them to be. That got me really thinking about the empowerment and women in tourism. And their voice is very strong. They're very well-supported by an organization out there run by Arzu, whose story is one of many stories that are in the book. And this not-such-brilliant photograph is of a girl called Sari. And many of you all know that my research is essentially about water in destination communities and the impact of the overuse of water by hotels and the impact that that has in destinations, and particularly on women. So I was doing research about that in Labuan Bajo, where Sari comes from. Sari is Labuan Bajo's first-ever female-- local female-- dive guide. She was empowered through her love of diving, her desire to dive, to do a job which, in Labuan Bajo, is only done by men, to resist her father, and to do the job that she really wanted to do. And when I interviewed her the first time, she was talking all about how the power that she had to do something which her father had forbid her to do in the first place. She also said, during that very first interview-- but I'll never get a husband, because no man around here would ever marry a woman that does this kind of job. At the time, her love of diving was great enough for her. Maybe the marriage prospects were far enough in the future for her not to be worrying about this, but she said that. Wind on one year, and she was in love. She was in love with a local guy who was a dive guide, and she just said, well, he'll understand, because he loves diving too. But she fell pregnant extremely quickly, and when you're pregnant, you can't dive. She gave up her diving. Sari gave birth to a baby daughter in the clinic in Labuan Bajo. Labuan Bajo is a town that receives 63,000 tourists and has over 50 hotels and guesthouses, all of which have running water. The clinic she gave birth in does not have running water. I'm very sad to say that Sari's baby didn't make it, like so many babies born in that clinic. She got an infection and died. How empowered is Sari by tourism? And that was-- Sari wasn't even pregnant when this book was begun, but I went to the authors in the book and to the women who would write stories for me for that book and I said, does tourism empower women? And that's where the starting point for the book was. And the stories were not Sari's stories. The stories were of women who succeeded. The stories were of women who might have struggled-- struggled with institutional barriers, struggle with patriarchal norms, struggled with inequitable global systems that they live within, but they were stories of grit and determination. There were stories not of economic empowerment a la the World Tourism Organization that talk about empowering women through tourism, not about getting money from tourism. That's not what these stories told. These stories told of resilience, of care and of support, of helping one another, stories of pride and confidence, stories of success against systems. And from every continent in the world, countries all over the place, the stories all had very many common threads to them. But-- there is a but-- many of them also talked about fear. Many of them talked about being scared of sexual violence. Many of them talked about their safety being violated, or the fear of their safety being violated. And they live under a shadow which they shouldn't have to live under. And I'm sure that everybody in this room would agree with me-- there is so much more that could be done to help all the women that work in tourism. And when I conceived of this seminar-- symposium-- to launch the book, it was because I wanted to be able to have a discussion not about what we know already, but what we can do, how we can move the arguments forward, how we can make things happen in a positive way. So I just got a few points to make about what I think. I'm very interested to broaden out and hear what other people think about what we can do. And hopefully we're going to get some help from the other speakers on the panel. First and foremost is the recognition that gender equality is a human right. A lot has been done with human rights and business. A bit has been done with human rights and tourism-- the business of human rights and tourism-- post [INAUDIBLE]. But gender equality has very much been squashed to the margins of those debates. Other things have been far more highlighted as the important human rights issues that the travel industry needs to consider. And I'm saying put gender equality back to center stage of those discussions. Secondly, it's about gender-friendly working practices. I probably won't get the quote exactly right from the book, but one of my favorite quotes from the book comes from the only quantitative study in the book. Nearly all the studies are qualitative studies, but one study from Portugal involved 400 tourism businesses in Portugal. And the statistical significance of the difference when a woman is a manager for the policies which are put in place by companies to have better work-life balance and more support for care by the employees. And the quote that I like so much is "When men do childcare, the--" "When men work in the home, the invisibility of childcare comes to light--" which comes out of Portugal from the fact that with increasing divorce rates in Portugal, a lot of men are having to pick up looking after kids some of the time, and all of a sudden they're thinking, God, this is-- people have been doing this and not rewarded for it? If you go to work-- if you come to Intrepid, you get a wage. The government gets a tax. If you work at home producing the next lot of workers to work at Intrepid, you get nothing, all right? And that's the fact of the matter. And the point is that there are companies that do have gender-friendly working practices, which meant men are able-- and many men want to-- do the school one in the morning, finish early to pick the kids up without penalty-- the stuff that women have been doing for ages, all over the world, and it has been causing them a penalty. So I think there's an awful lot of work that could be done around that. There's a lot of work that can be done in policy. Governments can do it. Governments can put action plans. They can listen to women's voices when creating the plans. I'm not going to talk more about it, because Paolo's going to talk about that with the case study in a bit. I have to keep turning around this way. I think there's a huge amount of work to be done around gender awareness, particularly when it comes to unconscious bias training. And when I was in Melbourne a couple of years ago, I met Robyn from Intrepid. She told me about the rolling out of the unconscious bias program throughout Intrepid. And I was like yes! Somebody! I've been searching for a company-- a tourism company-- that does this! And the beginnings of my relationship with Intrepid, right? So if Intrepid can do it, why can't other people do it? Why is it so difficult? Maybe Natalie from PEAK Intrepid will be able to explain that. And I also think there's quite a lot of work to be done around gender auditing and certification. When you audit something, you reveal the processes, the systems, the barriers which exist within a company that prevent gender equality-- if you're doing gender auditing. If you can have certification around recycling, why can't you have certification around gender equality? And more than that, what I think is very necessary is for there to be analyses of the impact. When you change x, the result is y. When you put women managers in place, it results in more gender-friendly working practice policies. If there isn't the analysis of the impact that these things have, nobody shouts about it. Nobody follows the pack. Nobody follows best practice. So I think that there's quite a lot of work that can be done there. And Nicole-- Nicole from Travelife is going to talk more about that, I hope. And last but not least, it's spreading the word. We have the World Travel Mart and ITB Berlin and loads of others-- WTTC, you name it. There's loads of them, right? The most sustainable car hire company, the greenest hotel-- and so giving awards for this, giving awards for that, giving awards for the other. Have you ever heard of the award for the most gender-equal company? Why not? Why is everything else so important, but gender equality isn't important? When clearly it is, since 60% of the workforce in tourism are women-- you know, hello? Shouldn't we be getting some awards for doing right by those women? Can you imagine the difference it would be if booking.com or TripAdvisor had gender-friendly scores for when you chose your hotel? They have how green it is with their silly little symbols. If that does make a difference-- and if it didn't make a difference, why do they have it? But if that does make a difference, then why haven't they got one for gender equality? So spreading the word-- when people do do good stuff, there has got to be some mechanism for that to be shouted about and the best practice to be heard about. And more ideas on that, hopefully, will come from our discussions. So I just want to finish by saying that the book is an inspiration as a way of saying if only every company, if only every destination, if only every country would do a few of those amazing things, what a huge difference we could make.