Gender, Work and Rural Employment

Produced jointly by FAO, IFAD and the International Labour Office, this report treats agricultural and rural employment as a gendered field of work rather than a narrow question of who owns a farm. It asks what is known about women’s and men’s work both on and off the farm, where the evidence is missing, and which practices might inform policy. Its three-part structure moves from a global perspective to consequences and policy options, then to selected workshop contributions. The FAO title page dates the volume to 2010; the ILO catalogue records its publication on 21 January 2011, so the two institutional records use different publication dates.

That scope matters because a farm boundary can hide as much as it reveals. Rural livelihoods may combine cultivation, processing, seasonal wage labor, household production and care. If official measures privilege formal jobs or paid hours, women’s work can appear marginal even when it sustains production and workers. Conversely, celebrating women’s “contribution” without asking who controls earnings, time, land or working conditions can make extraction sound like recognition. The report’s attention to gaps in data and research is therefore part of its argument: what institutions count helps determine which inequalities they can see and address.

The report uses the United Nations Decent Work Agenda as an organizing framework: better jobs, social protection, labor standards applied universally, and more equitable rural institutions. This shifts the question from how women can become more productive within existing arrangements to whether rural work is secure, fairly rewarded and covered by rights. It also makes visible that employment policy cannot be separated from institutions—land rules, labor protections and social services shape which choices are realistically available.

The volume should be read as a policy map from its period, not as a current statistical portrait of rural work. Its durable contribution is methodological: it treats farm and non-farm employment together and makes research gaps a policy concern. A feminist reading can extend that move by asking who is missing from the categories, whose unpaid labor subsidizes “employment,” and whether proposed pathways out of poverty expand workers’ bargaining power or simply insert them into low-paid value chains. Pair it with the FAO’s 2025 regional study of women in Latin American and Caribbean agrifood systems and the UN guide to women’s land rights. Consult the FAO report record and full text and the ILO publication record.