The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems

FAO’s 2023 report asks readers to look beyond the farm gate. Agrifood systems include production, processing, distribution and consumption, so women’s work cannot be understood by counting landholders or farmers alone. A woman may cultivate a family plot, process food for wages, trade in a market and still be recorded as an unpaid helper rather than a worker. The report’s broad frame matters because where measurement begins affects whose labor, income and contribution become visible.

The report estimates that agrifood systems employ 36 percent of working women globally and 38 percent of working men. Women’s presence does not mean equal conditions: the report describes women’s jobs as more likely to be informal, irregular, part-time or labor-intensive, and reports that women in agricultural wage employment earn 82 cents for each dollar earned by men. It also discusses a productivity gap between women- and men-managed farms of equal size. That comparison is useful evidence of structural inequality, but it is not a natural measure of women’s capacity: access to land, credit, training, irrigation and suitable technology shapes what a farm can produce.

The report also shows why employment cannot be separated from care and shocks. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it reports that 22 percent of women in off-farm agrifood jobs lost those jobs, compared with 2 percent of men. Food insecurity and unpaid responsibilities increased as livelihoods contracted. The links between these outcomes are not incidental: when care is treated as a private reserve that households can draw on without limit, the costs of economic crisis are shifted back onto women and girls. FAO’s discussion of childcare, social protection, land tenure and gender-transformative policy therefore points beyond training women to perform better within unchanged arrangements.

One tension is the report’s use of productivity and economic-return projections to make a case for equality. These measures can move ministries and budgets, but they risk suggesting that women’s rights matter because they produce more food or growth. A feminist reading keeps both questions in view: who gains when resource gaps close, and what forms of agency, security and collective decision-making should be protected regardless of their monetary return? Global averages also cannot stand in for differences shaped by age, Indigenous identity, race, migration, class or local tenure systems.

Read this report as an evidence-rich map of the whole food system, then ask where local workers and movements would redraw it. Pair it with FemRes’s Food Sovereignty essay, which asks who controls seeds, land and food decisions, and the UN guide to women’s land rights. See the full FAO report and its findings and policy summary.