If women had greater access to land and resources, 150m fewer people would go hungry and more families would be able to break the cycle of poverty.
This year’s International Women’s Day campaign #BalanceforBetter, which kicks off on March 8th, is pushing for greater gender balance in the workplace, government and elsewhere as an essential ingredient for economies and communities to thrive.
Gender balance is also crucial to ending hunger, UN agencies say. If women farmers had the same resources as men, the number of hungry people could be reduced by 150m and agricultural productivity boosted by between 20% and 30%, they say.
What women eat can also impact poverty levels. If women have a healthy diet, their children will have a greater chance of growing up healthily and escaping poverty. By contrast, when women are malnourished, their children are more likely to be born underweight, making them 20 times more likely to die in infancy, or face greater risk of health and learning difficulties into adulthood. Women and girls in every region of the world are more likely than men and boys to be hungry. Millions of children are born per year with low birth weight, which is often the result of mothers receiving inadequate nutrition prior to and during pregnancy.
Women make up more than 40% of the farming workforce in developing countries, but comprise just 13% of agricultural landholders. They also find it even harder than their male counterparts to access the ingredients vital to boosting productivity: credit, agriculture extension services, fertilisers, water for irrigation, seeds, technology, tools, profitable cash crops, and market information.
Countries with the largest proportion of rural women in farming are Uganda (87.5%), Tanzania (78.2%), Sweden (67%) and Israel (65.1%), as highlighted in the latest Food Sustainability Index (FSI). The FSI measures food sustainability in 67 countries according to three key pillars: nutritional challenges, sustainable agriculture, and food loss and waste. The index was developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit with the Fondazione Barilla. Argentina (20%), Colombia (20%), Egypt (23.1%), India (30%) and the US (30%) have the lowest female participation rates in farming.
In many countries, land is inherited by male relatives, and controlled by men. In India, for example, land is inherited by a male relative in 82% of households that own land, according to India Human Development Survey data. Men make the decisions regarding the family farm, even when women have titles to the land, or when there is no male relative living on the farm.
Gender differences are not just evident in developing countries. In the US, women comprise 30% of farmers (in Arizona that rises to 45%), but their farms tend to be smaller and sell less. Overall, they control 6.9% of US farmland and 3.3% of US agriculture sales, according to a government census.
Their lack of recognition in the US has had “real consequences”, says the Female Farmer Project, which documents the global rise of women in agriculture. “Women have been left off land titles and bank documents; they have been denied federal loans and training opportunities; and until the 1982 census of agriculture, female farmers were not counted at all.”
And inequalities stretch beyond the farm to the food industry as a whole. A McKinsey report found that although women do most of the food shopping in the US, and make up almost half of the entry-level workforce in the food industry, they make up just a third of senior managers and directors, and less than a quarter at senior executive level.
Those pressing for a greater gender balance in all sectors say one of the major obstacles to change is lack of data.
In many traditional societies, women are responsible for carrying water and fuel for the family and preparing food, in addition to farming. Much of their labour is unpaid and unrecognised—and how many hours they spend on household chores, for example, is unknown.
“Data can be sexist”, Bill and Melinda Gates say in their 2019 annual letter. Most data about women in developing countries focus on their reproductive health, and there are no reliable data on how much they earn, or what they own, making it easy to undervalue women’s economic activity.
This lack of data “blocks progress for everyone. You can’t improve things if you don’t know what’s going on with half the population,” they say.
By contrast, when governments do have data that show them that women lift up their economy if they bring them into the formal sector, “they listen and they start to take action”.