She's careful about overclaiming. Whether tourism has genuinely changed local people's lives isn't something she'll say for certain without proper research — but what's visible to the naked eye is that tourism has opened job opportunities that weren't there before, particularly for women. Work in tourism used to be rare for women; now some have entered it directly, and more have found work in garment production, home industry, and manual labour that tourism's growth helped create. Her own 1991 research on Bali's garment sector, covering Gianyar, Tabanan, and Denpasar, found plenty of small local manufacturers, staffed predominantly by women from those same regions.
The trade-offs, though, need the same careful research she'd apply to the benefits. New activity has clearly emerged; agriculture has just as clearly lost ground, and stands to lose more. In her own village, near Singaraja, land bought by investors for tourism has visibly reshaped the place — and eventually, locals ended up seeking the jobs that same development created.
Not every change she's seen traces back to tourism specifically. Rising prices and shifting lifestyles owe something to broader development too, even as maintaining Bali's image as a tourist destination has made those services feel necessary to sustain. She notes, with some irony, that there's now discussion of building an international hospital — aimed, she suspects, more at supporting tourism than at serving ordinary Balinese.
Woman graduated still less than man. Data from 1998-2000 show woman who have certificate up to Senior High School less than man.
Her own statistics tell a stark story on literacy: roughly eight percent of men couldn't read or write as of 2000, against nearly twenty-one percent of women. Education overall has improved — her own university has opened new graduate programmes, evidence, she says, of a real push toward more qualified graduates — but the gender gap underneath that progress hasn't closed.
Land in her village has largely passed to outside investors, German buyers especially, paid at what she calls a standard, fair price. Bali's pull as a destination has drawn an exodus of non-Balinese arrivals who all need somewhere to live, driving up housing development and, with it, the social strain that tends to follow — drug use, crime, prostitution among them.
Culture, in her view, is being quietly sidelined even as tourism claims to celebrate it. Her research in Kuta did find one genuine upside: tourism income has helped fund temple construction and community halls (balai banjar). What troubles her is watching ritual objects and dress used as decoration in hotels and restaurants — a use she actively disagrees with, and would welcome specific government regulation to prevent. She's also noticed more women and girls wearing sheer, fashion-driven versions of temple dress, more style than devotion, which she thinks has thinned the focus of prayer itself.
Young people concern her most directly — rising drug use, sex before marriage, abortion, described almost as a widespread, sporadic pattern rather than isolated cases.
Why does the man have to say 'I love you' first, in order to get the relationship? We need a spreading of gender roles.
That question sits at the centre of her work. Bali's gender norms, in her reading, run through a deeply patrilineal system — men expected to initiate, women expected to wait, politics and public voice treated as inherently male domains. She won't pin every social ill on tourism alone; what she can do, concretely, is keep running workshops on gender through her community, in the hope of shifting a stereotype she considers older and deeper than tourism itself.
Government has made some progress toward gender equality, she says — but the cultural barrier underneath it is old, and won't move quickly.