This preparatory World Bank paper on tourism and gender explains the rationale for integrating a gender lens into tourism development projects. It also includes a set of resources designed to help development professionals
and project managers get started and find necessary data.* This paper paves the way for more in-depth operational research and data collection on what works for empowering women in the tourism sector.
Many advancements have been made in the empowerment of women, but women are still far from enjoying the same basic rights, privileges and benefits that men do. Women still earn much less than men, do a disproportionate amount of housework, have fewer rights, less social mobility, and limited access to resources. Research by the World Bank shows that women lag behind men in nearly all measures of economic opportunity in every country in the world.2 These inequalities are even more extreme in low-income countries. Achieving greater gender equality is a critical step toward the World Bank Group’s (WBG) goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity, and tourism is one pathway towards achieving these goals.
The importance of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls have been underscored in the 2012 World Development Report3 and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5). In 2015, following the adoption of the SDGs, the WBG published a new Gender Strategy for 2016 to 2030. This strategy focuses on how the WBG can move beyond gender mainstreaming toward greater transparency on the gender-based outcomes of projects in client countries. It outlines four strategic objectives for enhancing women’s economic empowerment:
i) improving human development,
ii) removing constraints for more and better jobs,
iii) removing barriers to women’s ownership of and control over assets, and
iv) enhancing women’s voice and agency.
To operationalize these objectives, the strategy calls for stronger research and evidence about what works for gender equality, and for more private-sector partnerships for effective gender outcomes.
