Gender and Diversity in Tourism

Abstract

My research career began later than most. My first profession was as a hotel manager across different locations in Europe. It provided fertile ground for the research problems that animated my second, academic, career. I state this fact in the mode of a recovering addict, because for 25 years, I worked, travelled, slept (not so much of the sleeping compared to the others) and talked tourism and hospitality experiences. After moving steadily through the ranks, my final position was as Executive Assistant Manager at the Mayfair Intercontinental London. As a senior woman executive, I was a rarity in my work world. My executive peers were mainly men and I wondered how, and why, that was. My second career as an academic has been a passionate, frustrating, intellectually challenging quest to explore women and men’s career patterns in hospitality and tourism. On reflection, my contribution to knowledge on gender in hospitality and tourism organisations can be viewed as a succession of theoretical and philosophic advances in why we should investigate gender and other diverse identities in multi-level studies in a meaningful and robust gender way. What distinguishes my research approach from many other gender studies in our field is that I take the feminist lens of centering the study on the participants’ experiences, positioning myself reflexively in the research, with the study’s ultimate aim to achieve social justice, in whatever small measure.