In recent years female entrepreneurship has been high on governments’ agenda, yet it often remains a ‘final frontier’ for women.
As the McKinsey Global Institute Report, 2015, found $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 through advancing women’s equality and ensuring women contribute fully to the economy. Catalysing women’s entrepreneurship and economic empowerment will also accelerate the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 5 “Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls”. Also, and importantly, female entrepreneurs use their business as catalyst for social impact and sustainable development, as shown by recent entrepreneurship reports by the British Council.
However, the outlook today is the share of female entrepreneurs worldwide still varies considerably across regions and remains well below the percentage of male entrepreneurs. For example, data shows that the number of small female business owners in The United States was down from 31 percent pre-pandemic to 22.4 percent in 2022. In Europe, female entrepreneurship can be as low as 1 percent in Italy and 4.4 percent in Germany (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2020), but here is the catch: a government-backed review in 2019, found that The United Kingdom is losing out on £250 billion of economic value every year because women face barriers to becoming successful entrepreneurs. Elsewhere, in countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, female entrepreneurship is much higher, but often the rise is driven by necessity over innovation.
All in all, the female entrepreneurship landscape is yet to be fully explored and maximised, with lack of access to finance, lack of guidance and pressure from domestic responsibilities remaining commonly experienced challenges.
However, there are reasons to remain optimistic for the future of female entrepreneurship, and this is particular the case in the travel, tourism and hospitality sector. This is a key sector for women employment, even accounting for post-pandemic changes, and a more popular sector than most for women to set up their own business. For example, in The U.K., according to the latest research [FSB2022], 31 percent of small businesses are owned by women, rising to 41 percent of FSB small businesses in the hospitality and tourism sector.
The reasons why tourism is an ideal place for women to enterprise are multiple. Visitors to destinations have many needs, which can be met by female led businesses. Particularly where domestic chores and child-care remain a core focus for women, enterprising can be a way to earn income flexibly, often from a kitchen-table. And whilst we should not underestimate the value of discussions around the role of women in the informal tourism economy, the importance of equal pay, the lack of financial support and other important issues encountered by women in the sector, it is true that because of the low barriers to entry prevalent in travel and tourism, many women can enter the sector as micro and small businesses, independently from qualifications and track record.
[su_note note_color="#19bed3" text_color="#ffffff"]This also means that more women, in more places, and in diverse circumstances, can access and control some level income.[/su_note]
This certainly sounds like a GOOD thing to us!
Tour-guiding is one role where women enterprising skills can shine and enable their economic empowerment. While historically a male dominated career, and one that in some countries women still struggle to access, there is no doubt that several factors are contributing to creating more opportunities for women tour-guides such as:
Of course, traditionally highly respected tour guiding still relies on in-depth, historical, artistic, and cultural knowledge of a destination that is often linked to further and higher education. However, different models are also emerging.
In 2021, Women in Travel cic in partnership with Intrepid Travel developed three day-tours of London shaped by the stories and experiences of immigrant women and their communities. The Taste of Ethiopia tour (as it was dubbed by an FT journalist) is a successful tour of the off-the-beaten-track Shepherd’s Bush Market in West London and has provided Sefanit—an underprivileged woman from our community—the opportunity to diversify her income by setting up a micro-business: gain confidence and control over her life; share passionate insights into Ethiopian life and traditions that are bound to positively impact traveller’s perceptions of immigrants as well as the role that migrant communities can play in their host countries.
Whether new to tourism like Sefanit, or someone who is already involved in the sector perhaps as creator, writer or even travel designer, developing a day tour can help women diversify income and open a new business area. Furthermore, operators like Airbnb Experiences amongst others are growing their online offering enabling time constraints individual to work at their own pace.
So, if you have been thinking about setting up your own small business, consider tour guiding as a possible option. There are many resources out there to get yourself trained and one of them is the recently launched Women in Travel cic’s Tour Guiding Academy, with on demand courses and live mentoring delivered by expert of the caliber of Nikki Padilla Riviera, Elisa Spampinato, Klaudija Janzelj and Ivana Damnjanovic.
It is high time we re-write the statistics for women entrepreneurship… Travel and tourism offer plenty of opportunities to make it happen!