Gender on the agenda? The position of gender in tourism's high ranking journals

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Introduction

Gender, as a research focus, was not strong in tourism studies prior to the 1990s (Small, 2015). Norris and Wall (1994), from their examination of literature emanating from the academic field of tourism studies, concluded:

where differences in participation between women and men are identified, they tend to be noted rather than explained. Such research is seldom undertaken from a feminist perspective and indirectly may promote the status quo in that it usually ignores the different constraints and opportunities to which women and men are exposed (p. 58).

Tourism had traditionally been viewed as a gender-neutral social process. It was only in the 1990s that scholars highlighted the masculinity of the travel and tourism literature. To emphasise the biased perspective of the literature, Jokinen and Veijola (1997) ‘re-metaphorised’ the postmodern tourist in ways which are ‘not based on implicitly sexed bodily and imaginary morphologies’ (p. 23). Now we saw ‘gender’ move from being one of many demographic variables on a questionnaire (that is, differences between men and women) to gender being the foregrounded matter of study. In tourism studies, a number of seminal published collections attracted critical feminist contributors who recognised the marginalisation of women in tourism whether they be tourists, hosts or industry personnel: for example, the edited collection by Kinnaird and Hall (1994) Tourism: A Gender Analysis, the Special Issue of Annals of Tourism Research edited by Swain in 1995, and the edited collection by Swain and Momsen, Gender/Tourism/Fun (?) in 2002 which emerged from the conference of the same name held at Davis, California in 1997. These contributions emphasised a move beyond the ‘invisible’ and ‘add women and stir’ phases of traditional tourism scholarship to an understanding and problematising of gender as a social construct. Much of this work could be considered as fitting with critical studies and feminism where the underlying concerns were social justice, equity issues and power relations: giving voice to those who previously had been unheard – both researchers and ‘the researched’ and understanding and calling for change ‘by locating the phenomenon in its wider political, economic, cultural and social contexts’ (Critical Tourism Studies, 2016).

However, since this emergence of interest in gender from a Critical Tourism Studies standpoint twenty years ago, the social, economic and academic landscape has changed significantly with Neoliberalism now underpinning contemporary managerial philosophy with the emphasis on individualism and competitiveness within the state and university sector (Waitere, Wright, Tremaine, Brown, & Pause, 2011). To study the state of play of gender and tourism research from its hopeful beginnings, Figueroa-Domecq, Pritchard, Segovia-Pérez, Morgan, and Villacé-Molinero (2015) employed Scopus and ISI Web of Knowledge (WoK) to undertake a bibliometric analysis of journal articles containing relevant keywords to look for trends over the period, 1985 to 2012. Their findings indicated a relatively upward trajectory of publications over the last three decades. Nonetheless, they conclude that ‘tourism gender research remains marginal to tourism enquiry, disarticulated from wider feminist and gender-aware initiatives’ (p. 87).

Changes in the academic landscape have resulted in publication ranking systems in many countries, with tourism and hospitality management academics in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France and beyond subject to the pressures of publishing in high ranked academic journals. While we recognise debates and criticisms inherent in academic journal rankings (Gursoy and Sandstrom, 2016, Hall, 2005), such systems indeed persist, and are considered influential. Our study, a bibliometric analysis on the prevalence of gender-focussed/related journal articles adds to the research of Figueroa-Domecq et al. (2015) by focussing specifically on tourism and hospitality journals, and targeting only those ‘top tier’/‘top ranked’ journals considered to be the highest quality (Gursoy & Sandstrom, 2016). Of particular interest was whether gender research was undertaken from a critical studies stance or not.

Section snippets

Method

Techniques like bibliometric analyses can reflect what is – or is not – discussed, debated and published in journals, and can be powerful tools in examining whether topics such as gender and, specifically, ‘gender-aware initiatives’ are evident in these influential publications. Elsevier's database, Scopus, was used to conduct a bibliometric analysis of all articles and research notes focused on gender and tourism, from 2005 to 2014. Five top tier tourism and hospitality journals were selected

Findings

The journal with the highest number of gender-related words was International Journal of Hospitality Management followed by Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Sustainable Tourism and Journal of Travel Research. When examining each journal and comparing the number of articles/research notes with the search words to the total number of articles/research notes published in that journal over the examined period, the percentage was no more than 5.5% for any journal.

Discussion

Critical Tourism Studies has sought to legitimise the critical school of thought in tourism studies and to provide an inclusive environment for new and alternative voices in the academy. Gender has been central to the critical tourism project, with many critical scholars having built their careers on gendered tourism research. However, there is a real tension when gender and critical tourism scholarship is not being published to any great degree in what are seen as the most reputable,

Funding

There was no external funding for this research.

Conflict of interest

None.

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