With the coronavirus pandemic triggering massive job losses especially among women during tourism’s worst-ever crisis, the tourism minister on Monday called for more female leaders to help to stabilize tourism businesses in Barbados and the region.
Senator Lisa Cummins made the call during Monday’s online discussion in celebration of International Women’s Day on the theme, Choose to Challenge.
She noted that a disproportionate number of tourism workers who have been affected have been women.
Senator Cummins said: “Hotels, restaurants and the retail sector, accounted for a 2 to1 ratio of female to males during the period from February [2020]; more females were laid off than men because we have a larger number of females who work in tourism.
“The ratio if you were to put it into a percentage, is 65 per cent women, to 35 per cent men, and what that means is that all across our communities and all across our societies, there are women who have been leading in their families and in their homes and households, who have been employed and are now unemployed or underemployed, and are now forging a way on any given day, for their families and themselves, and still supporting others.”
The minister said that with the high unemployment seen with women inside the key foreign exchange-earning hospitality industry, it’s incumbent on women who lead to speak on behalf of those who are being adversely affected.
Senator Cummins declared: “We have an obligation, colleagues, fellow women in the tourism industry, to be able to have a conversation in the first instance, then do something about in the second. Where we have to be able to identify, those women who have been leading in the ways we have been describing so far today, who are now disproportionately affected.
“Globally, what I have just described, is applicable in almost every tourism-dependent economy. Here in the Caribbean, and in the Asia Pacific region we are seeing the same things, and it has to be a conversation nationally, regionally of course, but internationally about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in leadership, in the tourism industry.
“We have to lead a conversation globally about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism-dependent economies and we absolutely have to incorporate the critical issue of that impact on women all across the sector.”
Senator Cummins also stressed that women of any age can take up leadership positions, as she noted that the myth of leaders needing to be all senior in age, is a belief that holds no water in the 21st century.
“If you look at the Cabinet of Barbados, there are many of us who are in our 40s, and many of us people would have known our faces and names from times and spaces that are outside of Government but brought a certain level of exposure and experience, and fresh thoughts or ideas to the table,” she told the forum.
“They are not necessarily people who you may know; people who you don’t know, people who you never thought of before [but] take a chance on a chance on and say, come, can you do this, can you do that, I want to hear about this idea that I have been hearing you have. The notion that leadership is purely about experience and the time being in a given role, is a myth, especially for women.” (SB)
