Women in Digital

Opportunity

In Latin America, women’s tourism business ventures are often trivialised as an extension of domestic works and gender inequality persists in the e-commerce space which hinder women’s full access to digital entrepreneurship. Women entrepreneurs generally lag behind in terms of digital entrepreneurship, product/brand development and online marketing. Compared to males, women entrepreneurs also experience a greater sense of vulnerability relating to online sexual harassment when engaging in e-commerce. The Women in Digital project aims to empower women entrepreneurs to succeed in international tourism markets by cultivating their digital entrepreneurial competency.

Action

Led by Associate Professor Catheryn Khoo-Lattimore and Dr Elaine Yang of Griffith Institute for Tourism (GIFT), and in collaboration with Dr Marisol Alonso-Vazquez and Dr Carla Ricaurte Quijano, interviews were conducted with women entrepreneurs in remote areas of Mexico and Ecuador to identify their digital training needs. Findings revealed that while business technology trainings are often assumed to be gender-neutral, and the participants’ own experiences show that the design of marketing materials for technology training do not speak to women, and the gender composition of trainers, program content as well as the knowledge delivery are gender-biased. As a result, the team co-designed a training programme through a gendered curriculum. Four workshops were conducted in Ecuador and Mexico, and a further fifth workshop was conducted to train the trainers.

Impact

The training workshops ensured that women tourism entrepreneurs receive business and digital skills in the areas that will genuinely increase their ability to be visible in the marketplace. The training equipped women with the confidence and digital competency critical to the sustainability and profitability of their businesses in the digitised and globalised tourism market. The project contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 to promote gender equality.

Training Material

This training material has been co-developed closely with female entrepreneurs who told us what skills they need, and how they want to learn. We’ve designed the course to be very hands-on, and participants leave the workshop developing materials for their own digital marketing and improving their social media strategies. The material has also been translated to Spanish. We warmly encourage you to peruse the slides and if you would like to use the resource simply seek the permission from the authors at c.khoo-Lattimore@griffith.edu.au. Once granted permission trainers are welcome to use the materials with the condition they credit the authors and funding bodies.

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