Women in Tourism: Exploring the Links between Women's Skills Development, Empowerment and Employment

Abstract: Women's empowerment is a current and crucial issue of our time. There is increasing recognition that the economic empowerment of women is essential both to realize women’s rights, and toachieve broader development goals such as economic growth, poverty reduction, health,education and welfare. This qualitative study explores women's empowerment through skills education and employment in Bali, Indonesia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the respondents experience of changes in their everyday life conditions, with particular focus on economic empowerment, with reference to other spheres of the women's empowerment. The aim is to provide knowledge that may be valuable for the work with vocational education and training for women's empowerment in the future. The study relied on semi structured interviews with Indonesian women exploring individual experiences in their everyday local context. Empowerment is a complex topic with an irreducible subjective element. The results showed empowerment at the individual level and as the research highlighted changes in different areas oftheir life was it proved difficult to grasp the extent of this change. In general, the participants experiences somewhat differed, depending on internal and external factors as well as context, describing varied changes in their life conditions. However, all the women explain the outcomeas more or less successful in different spheres of their lives. The study also stresses the need for further research, suggesting exploration in the field with supportive quantitative evidence and longitudinal study.