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Gender

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Gender equality and women’s empowerment

Women comprise 36 percent of the world’s agricultural employment, with a particularly significant role in agrifood systems in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia (FAO, 2023). Despite their essential contributions to food and nutrition security as well as agricultural and rural development, rural women and girls continue to face pervasive barriers and discrimination, with unequal access to productive resources, services, decent employment, and markets. The root cause of gender inequalities lies in discriminatory social norms, attitudes, and beliefs, as well as rigid gender roles that affect how women and men behave, their opportunities and aspirations (FAO, 2023). The gender gap imposes high costs on agriculture and food systems, the broader economy, and on women and their families. Addressing gender issues in policies, programmes, and investments in agriculture and food systems is crucial to overcoming the marginalization of rural women.

Achieving gender equality means ensuring that men and women fully enjoy their rights and have the same opportunities and entitlements in civil and political life. This can be achieved by addressing their specific needs and priorities and providing them with the same engagement, treatment, and benefits.

Women’s empowerment is the process of supporting the advancement and enhancement of women’s power and agency to expand their ability to control their lives. It implies empowering and enabling men and women to participate more effectively in agrifood systems, which also translates into improving the well-being of their children and future generations (FAO, 2023). Achieving gender equality and empowering rural women, men, girls, and boys will not only improve nutrition, health, and education outcomes but will also bring both immediate and long-term economic and social benefits for families, communities, and nations at large. It encompasses dimensions such as resources and services, agency, and power.

Gender mainstreaming is defined as “the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies, and programmes, in all areas and at every level. It is a strategy for making women's and men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic, and societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequalities are not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of gender mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality (ECOSOC, 1997).

The FAO systematically integrates a gender perspective in its normative and technical work, making gender mainstreaming central in the development of policies and programmes. When the gender gap is too wide, FAO carries out specific programmes and projects that target women and adopt measures that ensure fairness and impartiality in the treatment of women and men, in terms of rights, benefits, obligations, and opportunities, according to their needs and priorities – this is gender equity. While gender equality is the goal, equity is, at times, the means to get there.

What does FAO do?
  • FAO promotes gender-transformative approaches to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. These approaches critically examine, question and change discriminatory gender norms, attitudes, behaviours and social structures that create and perpetuate inequalities. The approaches aim to transform unequal power relations, discriminatory formal and informal institutions, and the mindset of individuals and organizations to improve the lives of both men and women in rural communities.
  • FAO supports governments in creating an enabling environment for rural men and women by fostering appropriate governance; advocating gender integration; and enhancing capacities to design gender-equitable legal and regulatory frameworks, sectoral policies and programmes. FAO helps with collecting and analyzing sex-disaggregated data to generate an evidence base to support inclusive rural transformation. FAO works with national stakeholders to implement projects that aim to increase women’s and men’s access to and control over productive resources and decision-making power.
  • The work of FAO is guided by its Policy on Gender Equality 2020–2030, with the goal to achieve equality between women and men in sustainable agricultural production and rural development for elimination of hunger and poverty.

  • Gender equality is essential for attaining food security and nutrition, and for ensuring that everyone has stable access to enough high-quality food to lead an active and healthy life.
  • Women are critical agents of change and resilience builders in the fight against rural poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. If they have the same access as men to productive resources and services, women could increase yields on their farms significantly, which in turn, would reduce the number of hungry people in the world.
  • Gender-transformative approaches can help address the persisting gender inequalities that prevent food security and nutrition and sustainable agrifood systems.
  • To close the gender gap in agriculture, policy interventions must address the root causes of gender inequalities and reverse discriminatory norms and practices that perpetuate these inequalities.
  • Achieving gender equality implies providing women with equal access to productive and natural resources, services, markets, infrastructure, decent employment, innovations and technologies. It requires building women’s knowledge, skills, abilities and leadership in rural institutions and organizations, as well as in shaping laws, policies and programmes.

To achieve equality between women and men in sustainable agriculture and rural development, and in food systems, to eliminate hunger and poverty, FAO recommends that countries, United Nations (UN) agencies, civil society organizations, bilateral and private sector partners work together towards the following outcomes:

  • Women and men have equal voice and decision-making power in rural institutions and organizations to shape relevant legal frameworks, policies, and programmes.
  • Women and men have equal rights, access to, and control over natural and productive resources to contribute to, and benefit from, sustainable agriculture and rural development.
  • Women and men have equal rights and access to services, markets and decent work, and equal control over income and benefits.
  • Women’s work burden is reduced by enhancing their access to technologies, practices, and infrastructure, and by ensuring an equitable redistribution of responsibilities, including at the household level.

Through the Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition, FAO collaborates with the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Programme to embed gender-transformative approaches in policies, policy dialogues, programmes, and in the culture and working modalities of institutions, in order to strengthen initiatives that target the Sustainable Development Goal 2.

The FAO Dimitra Clubs are empowering rural women and men through collective action, self-help and community engagement. The Clubs adopt a community-led and gender-transformative approach that trigger changes in gender roles and relations, behaviours and social norms, resulting in significant improvements in rural livelihoods, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, social cohesion and community governance.

Through the UN Joint Programme on Accelerating Progress Towards the Economic Empowerment of Rural Women, FAO collaborates with IFAD, UN Women and WFP to economically empower rural women and ultimately improve their livelihoods and rights and those of their families. The programme is operating in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Nepal, Niger and Rwanda, using an integrated approach to reduce rural poverty and gender inequalities and to promote rural women’s rights in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

FAO is working in small island developing states to enhance rural women’s participation and benefit from value chains. Through the subprogramme, Empowering Women in Food Systems and Strengthening the Local Capacities and Resilience of Small Island Developing States in the Agri-Food Sector, FAO works with partners and governments to create an enabling policy and institutional environment that increases rural women’s access to and control over productive and natural resources, innovative and climate-resilient services, technologies and practices.

FAO collaborates with governments to analyze countries’ agricultural and rural sectors from a gender perspective, at all levels: policy, institutional, community and household. The findings and recommendations are reported in the FAO Country Gender Assessment series, which are used to inform gender-responsive country programming, projects and policy processes.