Women in Travel Journalism: Has it really improved?
Earlier this week, ‘Owen Jones’ was the second most trending name on Twitter. As Janice Turner explained in her tweet which spoke about the issue, he was accused for ‘relentlessly persecuting women online, including his own colleagues’. An external investigator brought in by The Guardian has found him guilty of bullying a female columnist.
After keeping his fans, followers, and pretty much 90% of Twitter in the dark by being quiet all day on Twitter, Owen Jones finally responded to the allegations online by Tweeting an official statement by The Guardian:
This got me thinking, are women really still being unfairly treated, and / or represented within the journalism industry?
I then started to think more closely about the travel industry.
Have you ever wondered or considered why men seem to write most travel books?
Being a millennial, I’ve grown up with the issue of gender inequality being a fairly commonly spoken about issue. We so frequently see feminists posting gender empowering content online, and International Women’s Day has never been so widely celebrated across the globe through social media!
So, I feel like I’m generally aware of how women have been unfairly treated through history, but never before had I put much thought into how gender equality was still an issue within the world of travel journalism.
.. So I began to do some research, and from it, it seems that unfortunately, travel journalism is no stranger to the issue.
Image from Journalist on the Run.
Firstly, so many travel writers are men!
In her piece published in New Republic, Gwyneth Kelly says she is annoyed by the prominence of male names when it comes to famous travel writing pieces: Bryson, Cahill, Theroux, Wilson, Krakauer.
Citing pieces published online in The Telegraph, Outside, and Matador Network, Hailey Hirst remarked how poorly represented women are in articles listing must-read travel books. Or, as she aptly puts it:
“Men seem to dominate travel literature… or at least the popular culture of it.”
In the book “News, Gender and Power”, Stuart Allen argues that today joujrnalism is still a predominantly male domain of work.
Photo by: HowStuffWorks
The gender pay gap also exists!
Recent statistics published by The Office for National Statistics(ONS) identified that there is an 11.1% pay gap between female and male journalists.
Photo by The Economic Times
In a recent article, these statistics are explained further:
Later in the article, the author also explains how she realised just how challenging it is to track down data about the travel jorunalism industry.
One useful data set was published by Codrea-Rado in 2020. She asked journalists writing for English-speaking publications to share the rates they received. To date, the #FreelancerPayGap campaign has received 852 entries and shows a 9% pay gap for journalists writing for US-based publications: on average, men earned $0.45 per word, against $0.41 per word for women and $0.34 per word for non-binary writers. For UK publications, men and women received an average of £0.26 per word apiece.
My Personal Experience…
On a personal reflection, I remember becoming a little more generally interested in the issue of workplace gender inequality last summer. In my second year of studies, I was required to complete a work placement and, of course, due to my passion for travel, I had hoped and planned to do an internship abroad.
However, due to Covid-19 — this didn’t quite go to plan. For the first time, a placement requirement was removed from our course syllabus.
However, eager to gain some real life journalistic experience (and with my travel desire still burning!), I decided to complete a virtual journalism internship in Tanzania (well… from my bedroom in Bournemouth!)
To prepare us for the possible cultural shocks of working with journalists from Tanzania, we had an in-depth discussions, and were advised to watch online videos which explained some of the major differences between Tanzania and Western cultures.
Something they spoke about a lot was how women are treated in Tanzania and, I’ve got to say, I was shocked.
What struck me the most is that I was told to not take offense if my collegue dismissed any of my ideas, or if he pitched it as his own because, yes, you guessed it… because I am a girl. In fact, I was actually told to accept it and to not disagree with my male supervisor purely because I was a women. Apparently, asking to pitch my own idea would be very disrespectful, and would have been viewed as very rude by all other Tanzanian journalists.
I was in disbelief about how openly they admitted it, and at how casually they expected me to just accept it as part of the programme! However, knowing it was only for a few weeks, I accepted this cultural difference, and went along with it with as much of an open mind as possible.
Now almost a year later, seeing the recent news of the allegation against Owen Jones, bought it all back to me, and I started to consider how gender inequality within the journalism industry might be more of a modern day issue in the UK than I had thought!
So why is it an issue? Really, where did it all begin?
There are many potential reasons for this, and in this post, I’m going to dig deeper into the issue!
1) Traditionally, travel writing had a male audience.
In The Best American Travel Writing, Tim Cahill explains how historically, “adventure travel” was target at a male audience. Cahill deplores it, and adds , “Kira Salak proves that adventure is not the sole province of men.” but Kira Salak proves that adventure is not the sole province of men.”
2) Historically, women travelled less than men.
In her blog post Leyla Alyanak suggests that the lack of female travel writers may be due to historical gender travelling privileges.
“It is true, men have benefited from privilege and position: they could travel more freely than women, they were often more educated, and they didn’t face the stigma of having their words and thoughts laid out in public.”
She also says that historically, women who could write tended not to travel — they were often nuns, and those who did travel, usually did so with their husbands, and often couldn’t write. Leyla states that:
“at times we have to read books by men to find out about women who traveled…”
Of course, there were exceptions — like Ban Zhao, the first female historian from China, or Lady Sarashina of Japan, a courtesan who traveled around the country with her husband and wrote of her voyages, perhaps the earliest female travel writer.
However, it seems that in general, women’s travel writing became more common as the centuries passed, and as women gained the freedom and power to travel more. So, let’s take a little look at the history of female travel writing…
Photo by: Women Travelling the World
17TH-19TH CENTURIES: WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS EMERGE
Sometime around the 17th century, female travel writing began to portray women traveling on their own or simply for pleasure. for example, Marie Catherine le Jumel de Barneville traveled extensively in Spain and England and wrote her most popular works based on these trips!
in the 18th century, travel was becoming more common for for leisure as well as business. Women often accompanied their husbands on trips and had plenty of free time to write their memoirs and tales of travel. As transport improved, people began to travel further — especially the English, who wandered not only to the sunny South of Europe but far afield to Africa and Asia.
Mary Wollestronecraft. Photo by Leyla Alyanak
A wave of intrepid English women travellers left its mark on literature during this period.
Elizabeth Craven wrote about her travels through Crimea and Constantinople — and her description of the Ottomans was scathing: they were clumsy, lazy, politically corrupt, corpulent — and Turkish coffee was bad.
Mary Wollstonecraft, an early women’s advocate and philosopher, traveled to Scandinavia, describing the breathtaking scenery and her connection to it.
Mariana Starke wrote the first European travel guide, and May Crommelin, from northern Ireland, traveled much further, to the Andes, the Caribbean and North Africa.
The mid-19th century welcomed the emergence in Britain of Mary Seacole, of Jamaican origin, and her “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands”, which retraced her travels in Panama and in Crimea, where she served as a nurse during the Crimean War. Hers was the first autobiography by a Black woman in Britain.
Then there was Nellie Bly, an American investigative journalist who convinced her editor to send her around the world in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Around the World in 80 Days!
Gradually, women travelled more, and wrote about their experinces to naturally gain fame acceptance for it!
INTREPID WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS: THE 20TH CENTURY
The intrepid women travel writers of the 20th century were as affected by the expansion of air travel as were their earlier sisters by 19th-century rail travel.
Women traveled more for work, and became increasingly independent! From that freedom was born women’s travel writing.
Bedouins in the Arab Desert around the mid-20th century. Photo by Leyla Alyanak
Dame Freya Madeleine Stark was one of the first Western women to travel through the Arabian deserts. She often traveled alone into areas where few Europeans — and even fewer women — had ever been.
Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel made history in the early 1900s by walking, disguised as a male beggar, from China across Tibet and into the forbidden city, which she was the first Western woman ever to enter. She lived more than a century — and surprised her local authorities by requesting a new passport at the ripe old age of 100!
Leyla Alyanak explains “That said, if you get the feeling the early 20th-century female travel writing world was exceedingly white, you would not be wrong. Most were indeed white, whether for reasons of colonization, society, privilege or income. Yet women of color who were able to travel did so and wrote about their experiences.”
Take Juanita Harrison, who became a bestselling author after publication of her autobiography, “My Great, Wide, Beautiful World,” a collection of letters she wrote from her travels in Europe and South America.
Or Zora Neale Hurston, an African American anthropologist who wrote about race, delving deeply into cultures and documenting her travels around the Caribbean and the American South.
As the century marched on, more and more women traveled for work, often as journalists, and wrote about it.
More recently, modern-day journalists such as Kate Adie, former Chief News Correspondent of the BBC, have chronicled their travels. Adie brilliantly documented some of the major conflicts of the latter part of the 20th century — Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Tiananmen Square, Sierra Leone — in her first book, the autobiographical The Kindness of Strangers
21ST CENTURY WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS
Today’s young female travellers give us hope that female writers are on the rise!
Take Elizabeth Gilbert, who in her twenties began winning awards most of us would be content to have at the end of our careers. Her memoir of a year’s personal exploration, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Across Italy, India and Indonesia, got her onto the New York Times bestsellers’ list and has become a major Hollywood movie.
And Cheryl Strayed, who wrote Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail which gave us an inisght into how she hiked alone through many miles of inhospitable, desolate land.
21st Century Journalism and the Internet
And it’s not just travel books… Other female travel journalists have been able to begin their career of travel writing purely through the ease of online travel writing and travel blogs!
Photo by: Centre of Excellence
So, it may seem that there are more female travel journlists than ever before. Female independence has also increased, and travel has become easier for women. So, on the surface, it kind of seems that female travel writers are becoming more accepted in the world of travel journalism — doesn’t it?
… But then why is it that the majority of travel books still seem to be written by male journalists? And if gender equality has really been achieved in the industry, then why is there still such a large pay gap?
So, what do you think — has the industry really improved for women?
Do you think my internship expereince was just a one off? Can it be excused for the cultural differences between the UK and Tanzania, or is it also a Western issue that needs to be more strongly addressed across the globe!?
Let me know your thoughts, and as always, feel free to comment your opinions about the topic below, or by tweeting me @ellabrown_news.
Ella x
