English - IFAD

Chapter 2 The state of rural poverty today 61
BOX 1 Gender inequalities in agriculture – some examples
• Men’s landholdings average almost
three times the size of women’s
landholdings (globally).
• Fertilizer is more intensively applied on
men’s plots and is often sold in quantities too
large for poor women to buy.
• An analysis of credit schemes in five African
countries found that women received
less than one-tenth of the credit that was
received by men smallholders.
• In most developing countries, rural women’s
triple responsibilities – farm work, household
chores and earning cash – often add up
to a 16-hour work day, much longer than their
male counterparts. However, women
continue to lack access to important
infrastructure services and appropriate
technologies to ease their work loads.
• Women-owned businesses face many more
constraints and receive far fewer services
and support than those owned by men.
In Uganda, women’s enterprises face
substantially higher barriers to entry than
men’s, although those that exist are generally
at least as productive and efficient as men’s
in terms of value added per worker.
• In Guatemala, women hold only 3 per cent
of snow pea production contracts but
contribute more than one-third of total field
labour and virtually all processing labour.
Source: World Bank, FAO and IFAD (2008)
remain largely invisible and unrecognized in statistics and in public policy. Some of
the inequalities that women face in agriculture are shown in box 1.
There is debate on whether gender inequalities may result in women’s overrepresentation
among the income poor. It is certainly the case that women tend to
earn less than men in terms of rural wages. A recent study analysing gender gaps in rural
wages from 13 countries from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America 49 found that
in almost all cases, women’s hourly wages ranged between 50 and 100 per cent of
men’s. This can be seen largely as a result of overlapping disadvantages at the
household and social levels, which result in fewer, lower skilled, less stable or less
rewarding employment opportunities being available to women. Also, girls have less
access to education and skills development opportunities, particularly beyond
primary schooling. Despite the contested value of comparing income levels between
male- and female-headed households as a proxy indicator for gender-differentiated
poverty, 50 there are a number of studies that have looked at this in different regions.
Not surprisingly, given the diversity of female-headed households in terms of
composition, livelihoods and income base, the results are inconclusive. A household
headed by a widow may be particularly disadvantaged in many contexts, whereas a
household headed by a woman with an absent husband or son sending remittances
from the city may be among the better-off households in the community. 51
Irrespective of the gender of the household head, women’s income poverty is
largely a function of who has control over assets (including financial assets) and how