It’s International Women’s Day and I am sitting in the inaugural Women’s Travel Festival here in NYC. I am listening to the many women doing their presentations, sharing their stories, and exposing themselves emotionally for the sake of inspiring and empowering other women to travel. It’s truly a beautiful thing.
It’s wonderful to be surrounded by other women who share a similar passion, with varying degrees of courage, experience, and knowledge.
My hope for more women is that they find their calling and the ability to pursue the things that make them happy, whether it is travel, or anything else.
My hope for travel…or more specifically for travel media, is that it continues to change and embrace the growing diversity of people who love travel and want to take it on.
There are a lot of women whom I adore in this realm of travel, many professionals I admire. But in thinking about International Women’s Day, I am also reminded of how so not international travel media still is.
Most women, by nature, have an ability to connect and bond and converse and listen…and then story tell and share and describe emotions and experiences in a way that can be incredibly inspirational and deeply moving.
Combine these beautiful female characteristics with the varied perspectives and knowledge that diversity brings, and we can change the narrative of travel and the reach for female empowerment. We can open the space to allow us the opportunity to tell our stories, instead of having to sit back and listen or watch others tell it for us.
As I have always said, it is difficult to be motivated if the person trying to motivate is not someone you can relate to. Representation in media is so incredibly important and so terribly lacking in variety.
It’s wonderful to see so many women out and about, willing to learn and take on the steps to travel, whether with their family or alone. But we aren’t done. We need to go even deeper, so that the stories and images aren’t all the same.
A good friend recently told me that we are helping to change the focus of media and increase the demand for diversity in the same. I sure hope so. Cause we are ready.
