Tourism Flows and Gender Equality in the EU27: Evidence from Panel Data

This paper examines the relationship between tourism flows and gender equality in the 27 member states of the European Union (EU27). Drawing on a labor market and structural change perspective, we argue that tourism, as a labor-intensive and female-intensive service activity, may be associated with higher gender equality through employment, economic independence and human capital channels, while occupational segregation and poor job quality may weaken this link. Using a balanced panel dataset for 2013–2023 (297 country-year observations), with effective estimation samples of 2015–2023 or 2016–2023 owing to lagged regressors, we estimate country fixed-effects specifications with panel-generalized least squares (with and without cross-section weights), robust M-estimation and a backward variable selection procedure. Tourism flows appear to be positively associated with the Gender Equality Index (GEI) of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) in all 15 specifications, conditional on human capital, full-time equivalent employment, gender segregation, GDP per capita and R&D; the association is statistically significant at the 5% level in ten specifications and at or around the 10% level in the remaining five. The estimated elasticity is small (about 0.01) and considerably weaker than those of human capital and employment, and there is some evidence, although not robust across all specifications, that the association is stronger in the EU27 periphery, where gender equality is lower and tourism demand higher. Given the observational design, the findings are interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects. They suggest that tourism development in peripheral member states may complement, but not substitute for, policies targeting tertiary education, women’s full-time employment and job quality in tourism.