Last week, I spoke to a class of third-year communication students taking up Social Change at the University of the Philippines Cebu. The lecture was about my advocacy on sustainable tourism titled, “Tourism, Voice and Social Change,” and I began with a statement that often unsettles audiences who associate tourism with leisure, destinations and escape: tourism is not just an industry. It is a communication system.
Tourism tells stories about who belongs, whose culture matters and what a place is for. It assigns value. It amplifies certain voices while muting others. And like all communication systems, it is never neutral. Whether intentional or not, tourism communicates power.
Many tourism narratives reduce communities into products. Culture becomes performance. Risk is ignored. Labor, especially women’s labor, is rendered invisible. From a communication perspective, this is how power reproduces itself: not through force, but through normalization. Inequality becomes routine. Silence becomes ordinary.
One slide in that lecture lingered with the students long after the discussion ended: Women, Voice and Visibility. Perhaps because next month is International Women’s Month, or perhaps because the reality it described was so familiar. In many communities, women are the backbone of tourism and livelihood systems, yet they rarely appear as decision-makers, narrators, or leaders in official stories.
Women cook the food served to visitors. They weave the textiles displayed as heritage. They farm, clean, host, care and manage households while absorbing the shocks of climate change, disasters and economic uncertainty. And yet, their labor is often unnamed in brochures, footnoted in reports, or factored into gross domestic product. When communication fails to name work, it devalues it. When it devalues work, it excludes it from power. This is not simply an economic issue. It is a visibility issue.
During the lecture, I shared the case of women abaca farmers on Polillo Island, quiet workers for decades, suddenly finding space to speak, organize and decide. What changed was not their capacity; it was the narrative. When women began participating beyond attendance, when they led discussions, negotiated priorities and spoke in their own words, the system shifted. Voice translated into agency. Visibility translated into influence.
This distinction matters. Procedural empowerment, which is being present, complying and being counted, is not the same as substantive empowerment, where women shape outcomes, innovate solutions and influence decisions. Communication for social change demands the latter.
Tourism that claims sustainability but excludes women’s voices is neither sustainable nor just. Advocacy, as I told the students, is not simply about raising awareness. It is about shifting power relations. It asks uncomfortable questions: Who gets to speak? Whose knowledge is considered legitimate? Whose future is being protected?
As communication students and as citizens, we must be wary of what “resilience porn” is: stories that romanticize women’s endurance while ignoring the systems that make such endurance necessary. Celebrating women’s strength without challenging structural exclusion only transfers responsibility from institutions to individuals.
As International Women’s Month approaches, the challenge is clear. We must stop telling stories about women and start creating spaces where women tell their own stories on their own terms, in their own voices and with real consequences.
I ended the lecture with a line that bears repeating beyond the classroom: social change begins when communication stops speaking for people and starts speaking with them.
Making women visible is not charity. It is justice. And in tourism, as in society, justice begins with who gets to speak and who is finally heard.