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Decent Rural Employment

Module 6: Women and decent work
This module aims to assist policymakers, planners and practitioners in fostering gender equality in rural labour markets and actively promoting decent work for rural women. 

Promote gender equality and rural women's empowerment through decent work

Comprising 38 percent of the agriculture labour force, rural women are crucial for achieving the economic, social and environmental changes needed for a sustainable development of agrifood systems. However, even if remarkable progress has been made in advancing gender equality, significant gender gaps remain in women’s access to productive resources, technology, services, and decent job opportunities. Furthermore, women continue to face constraints in decision-making and planning processes and their role and contributions are still poorly recognized, including in official statistics and in policies. 

Closing the gender gaps in rural labour markets and agrifood systems will enhance the well-being of rural women and their households, which in turn will contribute to reducing hunger, boosting incomes, and strengthening the resilience of families and communities. 

This module provides resources that can guide policymakers, planners and practitioners in the formulation, design, planning, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of projects, programmes, strategies and polices that are gender responsive.

Despite their significant role in agriculture and the rural economy, women are more likely than men to be working in irregular, informal, part-time, low-skilled, labour-intensive and vulnerable work. This is true for women working in on-farm and off-farm agricultural activities. 

Women may not be systematically excluded from high-value, export-oriented value chains or from entrepreneurship activities in agrifood systems, but their participation is still often constrained by discriminatory social norms and structural barriers regarding their access to knowledge, assets, resources, services, technologies and social networks. Compared to their male counterparts, rural women also tend to face: more restricted access to productive resources and assets; greater burden of domestic work in the household; more limited geographic mobility; less access to financial and advisory services, inputs, digital technology, social protection, market information and infrastructure; and lower participation in rural institutions and producer organizations. These conditions severely limit their time and energy for productive and paid work and may reinforce the perception of women as secondary workers, confined to lower paid, part-time or seasonal jobs.  

Gender pay gaps persist almost everywhere, and in rural areas women earn significantly less than men for doing the same work. Furthermore, the power imbalances in rural labour markets can increase women's exposure to exploitation, hazardous work, abuse, sexual harassment, and other forms of gender-based violence. Compounding women's limited involvement in decent work is the persistence of gender-blind policies, laws and institutional practices.

More efforts are needed to address the gender gaps in the labour markets and related policies to ensure the empowerment of rural women and gender equality in the world of work. Closing these gaps will contribute to a reduction of rural poverty and food and nutrition insecurity and lead to a sustainable development of rural people's livelihoods.

FAO recognizes that increasing decent work and employment opportunities for rural women, in both on- and off-farm activities, represents a crucial development pathway that offers important socioeconomic benefits not only for women, but also for their families, communities and rural economies at large. FAO strives to promote gender equality and empower rural women through decent work. In particular, FAO works on: 

  • Developing knowledge products that illustrate rural women's multiple contributions to the rural economies and the crucial impact of supporting gender-transformative decent work interventions for their economic and social empowerment;
  • Providing technical support and capacity development to governments and other strategic partners to enhance their knowledge and skills to formulate and implement decent employment policies and programmes that ensure gender equality and accelerate rural women's empowerment;
  • Strengthening policy dialogue and policy coordination between key sectors and strategic stakeholders (e.g. governments, civil society, academia, the private sector), with an emphasis on identifying feasible policy options to address gender inequalities in rural labour markets and empower rural women, and monitoring the different impacts of policies and investments on men and women belonging to different groups.


Resources

This module provides links to country assessments of gender inequalities in rural employment, as well as to a global analysis of the gender dimensions of agricultural and rural employment.

This module provides access to guidance materials on gender-sensitive agriculture and rural development policy and programme formulation as well as more specific guidance on how to foster gender equality in the rural labour market, particularly in infrastructure works, entrepreneurship programmes, skills development initiatives and value chain development initiatives.

Case studies:

Good practices:

FAO e-learning courses:

Websites:


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