Gender Strategies at Work: Informal Female Tour Guides in Yangshuo West Street

Abstract

Many studies on the lives of female workers have shown the roles and statuses of women are influenced by their workplaces, which can be relatively gendered, such that female workers are confronted with various job challenges and have to come up with their own gender strategies to survive. However, these studies mainly focus on formal workplaces where female workers have social and economic power to some extent, which is significantly different from the situation in the tourism industry for front-line female workers who do not have any power. Through a spatial lens, this article focuses on female employees’ working characteristics and gender strategies in the tourism industry. Yangshuo West Street is selected to be the study site, as informal female tour guides in public spaces are very common there. By using qualitative methods including interviews and observations, this research indicates that female workers take advantage of various gender strategies to survive. These strategies include wearing close-fitting clothes to make prominent their feminine characteristics, developing supportive social networks with surrounding entrepreneurs, abiding by silence rules among peers and mediating with city inspectors. They endow a gendered nature with public spaces, where they struggle for survival and employment benefits by using gendered strategies.

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