The Woman Manager Era in Tourism

The tourism industry bears the characteristic of creating employment opportunities for women since it is an area which is advancing gradually and consists of many sub-sectors. The tourism industry is described as labor-intensive as well as women-intensive because it offers employment opportunities to women with different levels of knowledge and skills. This situation also coincides with the fact that the number of female employees working in the tourism industry is higher than in other industries all over the world. However, the traditional point of view limits women’s employment in the tourism industry to low and medium-level jobs. Also, it is perceived that those women in the industry are exposed to gender discrimination, glass ceiling barriers, underrepresentation at management levels, earning less income than their male counterparts, being unpaid in family businesses, and being a commodity in the exploitation of the body and labor (Elmas and Boyacioglu, 2021). In contrast to this background knowledge, our study focuses on the achievements of women in the Turkish tourism industry at various levels of hierarchy (including management) and in a wide variety of jobs and positions in entrepreneurship. In this direction, ten senior female managers who broke this cycle within the framework of the period of women’s management in tourism were discussed in the study. The examples of female managers analyzed indicate that these female managers from different areas of the tourism industry established their own management styles as well as the skills, attitudes, and habits of the age. These innovative management styles reveal that women are successful by making a difference in the business world. © 2022 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.