In 2026, the United Nations declared the International Year of the Woman Farmer, a global initiative designated to accelerate gender equality and women's empowerment in agrifood systems, and to draw attention to women's contributions across agrifood value chains, as well as the structural barriers that continue to limit their opportunities and livelihoods.

Within this context, the concept of women farmers is central to ensuring that research, data, and policy accurately reflect women's roles and realities. In AGROVOC, the FAO thesaurus, women farmers is a precisely defined concept that captures the full diversity of women's participation in agrifood systems. It extends beyond crop cultivation or land ownership to include producers, small-scale farmers, smallholder farmers, seasonal workers, fishers and fish workers, beekeepers, pastoralists, foresters, processors, traders, holders of traditional knowledge, women in agricultural sciences, and rural entrepreneurs, working in both formal and informal settings.

Discover more on this concept here.

The concept also explicitly recognizes diversity among women farmers, including Indigenous women, women living with diverse abilities, refugee and displaced women, and women in local communities. This level of specificity is essential for accurately describing agricultural knowledge and avoiding gaps in representation.

Imprecise or narrow definitions can result in incomplete data, unreliable analyses, and policies that overlook significant segments of the population. When research outputs and datasets are indexed without standardized concepts, women's contributions to agrifood systems risk being underreported or misclassified.

In this way, AGROVOC supports researchers, practitioners, and institutions by providing a common reference framework that enables consistent description of agricultural information across languages, disciplines, and systems. This improves search accuracy, supports comparative analysis, and facilitates the reuse and integration of data from multiple sources.

As the International Year of the Woman Farmer calls for concrete action, shared and well-defined concepts remain essential to transforming recognition into measurable impact.