Gender and Entrepreneurship in Tourism

Gender power narratives have become global and contemporary, yet in reality gender development remains culturally evasive in South Africa particularly in the Eastern Cape province. Gender inequality as a global sustainable goal is linked to other goals including economic development, no poverty and zero hunger. Although enterprise development initiatives, particularly, in food production and food consumption tourism are expanding, personal growth remains gendered particularly in vulnerable and marginalised societies. Enterprise development trends acknowledge the importance of personalised managerial and leadership skills, knowledge, values, and attitudes. A further analysis of these trends reflects that entrepreneurship opportunities towards financial access are quite gendered, technical support, exposure to innovative cultural transformation, disruptive technologies including artificial intelligence and virtual reality and big data are some of the significant challenges in tourism entrepreneurship. The chapter discusses how gendered tourism entrepreneurship development calls for capacity building towards empowerment and emancipation with an emphasis on managerial and leadership skills, knowledge values and attitudes in vulnerable and marginalised societies. Authors further therefore argues that gender empowerment restraints including cultural discrimination, fragmented and prescriptive development approaches should be abandoned. There is a need for more research initiatives on gender and power to promote sustainable tourism entrepreneurship. Theoretical and practical suggestions to address gendered entrepreneurship in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa are provided to contribute to the fifth Sustainable Development Goal of gender equality. The identification, explanation, analysis, evaluation, justification, and application of appropriate theories to leapfrog gendered tourism entrepreneurship, is a major theoretical contribution in this chapter.