Resource Center

Women in the tourism industry are underrepresented at executive levels of the top tourism companies worldwide despite the fact that women make up the majority of the tourism workforce in most countries. Our survey of 78 companies across four key sectors of the tourism industry found that only 15.8% of all board members are women. In more than a quarter of the companies surveyed, there was not a single female board member. While it is known that the representation of women in executive positions in the world’s top companies does not re!ect the proportion of women working at other levels, it has not been known that the tourist industry - in most countries dominated by women workers at lower-skilled levels -  suffers from such an imbalance. Our "findings suggest that the tourism industry is failing to promote women to the highest levels of decision-making despite having a larger pool of female talent from which to draw. In this report we set out our "findings over four key sectors of the tourism industry, both in the UK and internationally. The report addresses four key questions: What is the problem? Why does this matter for the tourism industry? Why does this problem exist? What is being done to tackle the problem? We close with a series of recommendations on how gender balance in the boardrooms of tourism companies can be improved.