Solo female travelers and who influences in their decision making

The hypothesis of our research is:

Female solo travelers are most influenced by their nearest/closest environmental agents when choosing South America as their travel destination in comparison to men.

We took a survey 35 women age 18-45. From this survey 81,8% of women said that they are influenced by media when it comes to make a decision for traveling. Also a 64% said that they wouldn’t travel to Latin America because they wouldn’t feel safe and at they end from this sample only 22,9% has actually been to any of the Latin American countries as solo travelers.

What we want is basically is to tell that most of the times women face most difficulties when traveling solo still in our days due different problems in our society: influenced by Mass control media, groups (family, spouses, friends, etc), also suffering gender discrimination due cultural traits is still present as there is no a total freedom as there is always the fact that a woman must look for safety places always before traveling alone.

Also it is important to mention and cite some sociology authors regarding this phenomenon (could be Maslow’s pyramid, Stereotype, discrimination theory, Robert Merton’s functionalism, etc.,) since it is sociology applied to the tourism. Thanks a lot.