Tourism and representation: a scale for measuring gendered portrayals

Abstract

This paper analyses the nature of the images of women and men represented in tourism marketing and discusses the wider socio-cultural impact of such imagery. It begins by briefly discussing the gendered nature of tourism experiences and then reviews work on tourism, gender and representation. The paper's substantive contribution to tourism gender research, however, is its adaptation and development of a content analysis technique which facilitates the quantitative analysis of gender representations. A case study of a range of UK tour operators' brochures is presented which confirms that tourism representation relies heavily on the use of women as sexualized product adornments. The value and limitations of the content analysis research tool are discussed, as is its further applicability as a measurement of representations in tourism marketing.