Women in Fisheries in the Mediterranean and Black Sea

Published by the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) and FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division, this report asks where women work across fisheries in the Mediterranean and Black Sea—and why their contributions are so often missing from the record. It combines regional employment estimates with qualitative interviews involving people in five countries. The authors describe the estimates as a first comprehensive picture for the region, not a complete census of every fishing community or task.

The study follows work before, during and after capture. Women may help build or maintain vessels and gear, work on boats or from shore, repair nets, clean and sort catches, process and sell fish, keep accounts, conduct research or work in fisheries administration. Yet these activities are not consistently recorded as fisheries employment. The report estimates women’s share at 38 percent of regional employment in post-harvest work, 16 percent before harvest and 10 percent at harvest. The categories matter: those are proportions within each stage, not the distribution of all women workers across the chain.

The study warns that small-scale fisheries are especially likely to be undercounted, including women’s work done away from vessels. A missing entry in a database is not merely a technical inconvenience. It can make women’s labor seem supplementary, weaken the case for decent conditions and social protection, and leave their knowledge outside decisions about resource management. But improved counting alone cannot redistribute authority; recognition must also change who is invited to organize, negotiate and shape policy.

The report’s mixed method is a strength: regional estimates show a pattern, while interviews help reveal tasks and barriers that aggregate numbers flatten. Its limits are equally important. Five-country interviews cannot stand for every coastal community, and employment categories capture only what the underlying systems record. A feminist reading therefore asks not only how to add women to fisheries statistics, but who defines fisheries work, whose knowledge counts as expertise, and whether sustainability policy listens to women as decision-makers rather than treating them as an untapped workforce.

Read this study alongside the FAO’s regional analysis of women in Latin American and Caribbean agrifood systems and the UN guide to women’s rights to land and productive resources. The comparison connects hidden labor across food chains without erasing the specific ecology and institutions of fisheries. See the FAO/GFCM report and the official study announcement.