Hi Reader,
I hope you are well wherever you are.
I am still in Siem Reap, on my last day before heading home after a month in Vietnam + Cambodia, and it's been a ride.
If you're keen on visiting these two countries, here's the waitlist. And catch my last few days on Instagram stories.
This week, I am sending the Tuesday email on Sunday because today is International Women's Day.
๐ฉ On this week's email
- We aren't fans of performative posts today, not on social, not in your email, so I will focus on one thing only: What supporting women in tourism REALLY means. Not on paper, but on the ground, with the day to day decisions that we make as travelers and as business owners.
The reality of supporting women
Today is the day everyone talks about equality and about how well they are doing to help women.
They will publish statistics on women working at the company, or women in senior positions.
They will take photos of the women at the company and post them on social media.
They may even organize an event where senior women speak and share their experience. Ironically, these tend to happen outside working hours.
Tour companies will showcase their female guides, their new women-only tours, the women guides they have and the office staff who are women.
But these are largely performative posts, and they make my blood boil.
Everyone thinks of women on IWD, and then they forget all about it for the other 364 days.
The statistics get buried, the uncomfortable truths are not talked about again, salaries stay the same, hiring numbers remain unbalanced and women take a back seat behind other priorities.
Until next 8th of March, when it will all come out again.
In the past, we mostly skipped IWD, at Solo Female Travelers.
There is already so much noise and so little attention. The marketing messages all blur together and nobody says anything of actual substance. It's all pretend.
Because we are in the industry, we know the reality behind the claims, and it is infuriating to see so much "womenwashing", as I like to call it - Using women as marketing props.
Much like greenwashing is the pretence that a company's values or services are environmentally-friendly, womenwashing is the tactic of deceiving customers by making them believe the company empowers women, offers equal opportunities, or promotes them.
More and more companies do that, just like it happened with the idea of eco-consciousness 15 years ago.
The equivalent of a hotel calling themselves eco-friendly because they replaced plastic water bottles with glass while refilling the glass bottles from plastic ones would be a tour company telling you they support women because they hired them, then paying them less than the male counterparts, or using their photos in marketing materials but never actually hiring them (then telling guests their child got sick and she couldn't come to work), or having 1 female guide then all the rest of the businesses being male owned and focused, and this woman actually having to fight misoginy on a daily basis.
I have seen all of this with my own eyes from companies who promote their female focus front and center.
They know women care about supporting other women, because they know how hard it is to be treated equally, paid the same and be given the same opportunities.
If I sound cynical and a bit disappointed it is because I am.
Instead of today being an inspiring day, it is a day when I get reminded of the hypocrisy in the industry, and I just wished companies stopped using women as a marketing slogan to sell more tours.
So this year, I wanted to share some thoughts on what it really means to support women in tourism, because I feel that a lot of the realities are often lost in the social media posts and the behind the scenes. I hope this will arm you with questions to ask the next female guide you meet and the next company who claims to support women.
As a traveler, Supporting women in tourism means:
- Hiring female guides, to give them employment opportunities and to hear their view of the country you are visiting. Many countries have a disproportionate amount of male guides and therefore, visitors get a perspective of the country through the male gaze that is often very different from that of women. By hiring a female guide, you can learn more about the lives of women in the country and create demand for women guides, thus telling companies that travelers want them. If you are using a tour company, agency or travel consultant, ask them to find you a female guide.
- Prioritising businesses owned by women, be it hotels, restaurants or shops. This is super hard to do since information is often not easily found. I spend a lot of time trying to find out who really owns a business. In some cases, male owners will pretend their wife, sister or mother own the business to capitalize on the goodwill (yes, I've seen that). But in most cases, this info is just simply not published and you can only find out going there and asking. I just had dinner at a fine dining restaurant in Siem Reap that is owned by a female chef and her all female team. She realised women had fewer opportunities and decided that she wanted to tilt the scale. You can too.
- Sharing reviews or feedback online and with the business owner of their female employees. If you had a good experience, share it with the owner / manager. Men get more opportunities than women, it's a fact, by praising the women guide, host, activity provider, you help them with visibility. Leave a review online and mention her name too.
- Supporting businesses that empower, employ or train women. Many male- or community-led organizations support women as much as women owned businesses do. While we look for women owned businesses, we also support those who may not be owned by women but hire and genuinely do support them.
- Questioning what you are being told. Ask the guide how she gets treated, what kind of challenges she needs to deal with, how she managed to get where she is, how she finds customers, and how you can help her.
As a tour company, Supporting women in tourism means...
- Staying flexible around their schedule, their family needs, their emergencies and their inability to predict the unpredictable. Women are often in more vulnerable positions than men because they do not have their wife, daughter, mother or sister behind ready to pick up the slack. When something happens, they are the ones called in to fix it. In an industry where you need to be available 24 hours of the day while on tour, ready to take care of any issues, many women just can't guarantee this level of service. To hire them, we have to build in redundancy and back up plans ready to implement if an emergency means they are unable to deliver the tour, lead the activity or show the place. Additionally, hiring women also means knowing we may lose them to marriage. In many countries, it is not socially acceptable for women to work outside the house after they get married or have children. Spending days hosting a group tour is often out of the question. Some women switch from national tour guide to local guide, offering day or half day tours in their city instead of week-long tours.
- Searching really hard, because men outnumber women in all positions across the travel industry, it is often super hard for us to find them. They have fewer resources, and this means they are less visible. They also get less work, and get hired less than their male counterparts, so they aren't easy to find in a world that prioritises visibility, social media reach, reviews and online rankings. I am often asked how I find them, and the answer is with a whole lot of asking around, researching and talking to people. Women always know other women, and the ones who share our mission and values are excited when we reach out to them, so they help us also find others. In countries where we have a local partner to help us organize the tours, they also help search.
- Betting on potential rather than success. As women in tourism are rare and a relatively new phenomenon in many countries, they are also less experienced. While a man could have been guiding for 15 years, in many countries, women only started guiding recently, so we can't rely on experience but need to find guides who have the potential, the ability, the excitement and enthusiasm instead of the long track record. We are happy about that, because we want to support smaller and newer businesses, but this means looking harder and making bets that have always played to our success and make Solo Female Travelers Tours all the more special.
- Bringing more women to the industry. Training women as new guides or porters where they don't exist, or helping put together experiences that weren't offered before. To have more female guides, we have gone to the source and offered training and financial support to obtain official guide certifications to those who were interested. Because women-led initiatives are fewer, and women are outnumbered by men, it is hard to find cultural experiences offered by women, so we have instead spoken to women willing to share their craft, their skill, their background or their homes with us and helped them set it all up as an activity visitors could participate in. Like a weaving demonstration, a home dinner and party or a chat with an artist of a dying craft.
- Paying women fairly and competitively. Simple, isn't it? Women get paid less than men for the same job in many countries, period. And many businesses still think this is justifiable. I have seen businesses pay women less for all sorts of excuses; from the fact that they are less reliable because of family obligations to being less assertive, or being more desperate for the job. We pay all our partners and suppliers what they ask, we often pay them more if we feel they are asking for rates that are below market or selling themselves short. We also help them with training, with any business support they may need, and with certifications if they wish to pursue them. This all seems so basic, I am baffled at how many companies get away with paying less.
I hope this IWD proves me wrong and it is less performative than previous years. But in case it is business as usual, I hope the above gives you some ideas to help change the narrative, ask questions and challenge what companies share in their glossy social media channels. Consumers have power, we have power, we can jointly force change.
Do you support women in your travels? How do you find businesses to support or female guides? What does supporting women mean to you? I would love to find out. Please reply to your email and share your thoughts! |
Sending you lots of love and courage from Australia and Cambodia
Your Solo Female Travelers Co-Founders
โ