Women are important in agriculture, and agriculture is important to women. Women around the world play important roles in planting, weeding, post harvest processing, food preparation, and so forth.
Pakistan owes a great deal of its agricultural production to the dedicated and untiring efforts of women. Although gender inequality involves comparisons between women and men, in most (but not all) cases the gender gap penalizes women. Considerable evidence exists that households do not act in a unitary manner when making decisions or allocating resources.
This means that men and women within households do not always have the same preferences or pool their resources. This has important implications for productivity; several empirical studies have found that redistributing inputs between men and women in the household has the potential for increasing productivity. Most recent estimates from FAO, based on internationally comparable data, show that women comprise an average of 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force of developing countries. The female share of the agricultural labour force ranges from about 20 per cent in Latin America to almost 50 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa and eastern and south-eastern Asia, albeit with wide variations within, and among, countries. However, in many instances, the roles women play in farming and production are not formally recognised. For example, the definition of the agricultural labour force used in internationally comparable statistics includes people who are working, or looking for work, in formal and informal jobs and in paid or unpaid employment in agriculture. It includes self-employed women as well as women working on family farms but does not include women performing domestic chores such as fetching water and firewood, preparing food, and caring for children and other family members. This definition tends to underestimate women's contribution to food security. Societies like those existing in Pakistan owe most of their food security to the selfless services provided by women.
Given the important role women play in agricultural production around the world, focusing on the unique challenges women face and the resources they lack is key to increasing overall agricultural productivity. Extensive evidence from the 1990s and a review of more recent literature have documented gender inequalities in agricultural inputs that disadvantage women as agricultural producers. To understand why agricultural productivity is often lower for women we need a broader understanding of the obstacles women face. For example, researchers found that the productivity per unit of land on female-managed plots in Burkina Faso was 30 per cent lower than on male-managed plots within the same household, because labour and fertilizer were more intensively applied on men's plots.
Despite the important role women play in agricultural production, they remain disadvantaged in numerous respects. On one hand, women have limited access to a wide range of agricultural inputs, including seed and fertilizer, technological resources, equipment, land, and so forth.
In addition, women often lack the capacity needed to deploy these resources. For example, women may have access to land, but lack access to the fertilizer needed to farm the land productively or lack the knowledge of how to properly apply fertilizer. Furthermore, many non-tangible assets, such as social capital, human capital, rights, and decision making powers, are more difficult for women to access.
Studies from Africa and South Asia demonstrate that women are disadvantaged in both statutory and customary land tenure systems. Even when legislation aimed at strengthening women's property rights is enacted, women often lack the legal know-how or enforcement mechanisms to ensure that these rights are maintained. In addition to well-documented gender disparities in education in many countries, studies from throughout Africa and South Asia find (World Bank and IFPRI 2010), that women are also disadvantaged with respect to labour because they have less access to labour-saving technology and to the hired labour needed for lucrative, labour-intensive cultivation.
Women are disadvantaged with respect to access to important technological resources such as fertilizer, improved seed, irrigation, insecticide, and mechanical power. In a recent review of differential gender access to non-land inputs throughout the developing world, empirical studies show that when input indicators were provided, 79 per cent men had greater mean access and 21 per cent women had greater mean access to the given technology.
These gaps in assets and inputs are a hindrance to agricultural productivity and poverty reduction. A wide-ranging body of empirical work suggests that increasing the resources controlled by women could promote increased agricultural productivity. Creditable agricultural research shows that reducing inequalities in human capital, physical capital, and current inputs between male and female farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa could potentially increase agricultural productivity by 10-20 per cent. Thus, agricultural R&D can play an important role in reducing gender inequality in these key areas when it works to enhance women's assets or improve the productivity of the resources that women do control.
Increasing women's education and other resources is a key way to reduce their constraints and increase agricultural production, which can improve food security at the household and higher levels. Orienting agricultural research to reduce those constraints can make a lasting contribution to this goal. For example, where women are labour-constrained, affordable mechanization can unleash their productivity. Research to develop effective ways of delivering fertilizer directly to the root zone of crops has helped increase women's fertilizer use because it has reduced the cost and the difficulty for women to transport the large bags of fertilizer needed to spread over a whole field.
Gender-responsive research needs to go beyond increasing the quantity of production as its only objective to include improving food taste, quality, nutrition, processing, resilience and other characteristics that are particularly important to women. This can increase the effectiveness of agricultural research by producing crops that reflect the needs not only of farmers but also of processors and others along the value chain. For example, in rural India, agricultural experts noted gender-based differences in preferences for rice varieties in that women give more importance to traits important particularly to females (such as weed competitiveness, ease of husking and threshing, and suitability for food preparation). A study in Rwanda undertaken by CIAT (Centro International de Agricultural Tropical) demonstrates the importance of recognising the expertise of female farmers and involving women in participatory plant-breeding processes. When 90 Rwandan female farmers evaluated genetic material over a period of four growing seasons, the bean varieties selected by the female farmers increased production up to 38 per cent more than breeder-selected varieties and outperformed local mixtures 64-89 per cent of the time.
Gender-responsive agricultural research can also result in greater sustainability of the environment and of agricultural development projects. Women and other marginalized groups often hold local knowledge of low-impact, low-cost methods and coping strategies that can prove vital in building capacity for resilient farming systems in response to climate change. Tapping into this knowledge and combining it with new research can make significant contributions to environmental sustainability. For example, recognising women's roles in seed selection and tending of wild or semi-domesticated crops can lead to greater conservation of agro biodiversity and retention of the knowledge of how different plants and varieties can be cultivated and used.