Women farmers and gender equality: Why closing the gender gap matters

Influencing healthier decisions

Women’s influence over decisions, including over household spending and farming, is associated with increased well-being, healthier diets, and better education within families and more diverse production on farms, compared to households in which men make most or all decisions. 

This goes well beyond the world of agriculture. Women who lead and participate in decision-making help create pathways for other women and girls aspiring to shape their own lives and communities as leaders, independent earners, and business entrepreneurs.

Leading sustainable practices

Women are often the custodians of traditional, ancestral, and Indigenous knowledge – serving as positive role models for women and girls, men and boys. 

They transmit this education to each new generation, along with practices that reflect a shared responsibility to protect and conserve land, water, seeds, and biodiversity.

Inspiring collective action

By working collaboratively, women farmers strengthen their voice and influence. Through cooperatives, savings and loan associations, peer mentoring programmes and farmers groups, women access and share resources and knowledge, build networks and markets, create more opportunities for women to shape decisions within households, communities, and local governance. This is especially important in spaces and sectors, like agriculture, where women often face barriers.

Women’s collective action not only contributes to greater income security. Working together helps make their communities more resilient to climate and economic shocks.

While women make up nearly half (42 per cent) of those employed in agrifood systems, women farmers face significantly limited opportunities.

Unequal pay and production

On average, women farmers earn 82 cents for every dollar (USD) that their male counterparts are paid.

And because of gender discrimination in access to financing, training, inputs, and education – especially in rural areas – women farmers produce less food than male peers (24 per cent) working the same size plot of land.

Unequal land and property rights

Women are far less likely than men to own or have secure rights over land – a disparity documented across 71 of 78 developing and European Union countries (91 per cent) with available data on agricultural land.

Significant, longstanding barriers to land ownership are felt acutely by women farmers. Unequal rights to land and property, both in law and in practice, can limit their ability to access, use, and control the resources on which their livelihoods depend.

Unequal care responsibilities

For many women, across many sectors, there is no “clocking out” at the end of a workday. Women farmers are not spared of this reality.

The unequal distribution of unpaid care work – the 2.5 times as many hours, on average, that women spend raising children, cooking for families, collecting water and fuel – means that many women farmers simply start another shift at home.

In disasters and conflicts, or because of environmental degradation and other crises, these inequalities deepen. For example, every day, women and girls around the world spend a combined 250 million hours collecting water for their households – over 3 times more than men and boys. When water is scarce, the time and energy it takes to access it increases.

Women often eat last, and least, especially when food is scarce in their households. In the face of climate shocks, women’s care responsibilities tend to increase. More time dedicated to the care of their families may mean less time to farm. Within this care–climate nexus, food insecurity and malnutrition rates can rise and women-managed farms can experience greater losses in productivity.

Addressing these inequalities requires investments, policies, and actions grounded in women’s real experiences and aspirations.

Understanding the impacts of gender inequality means recognizing the pregnant farmer pulling in the harvest by hand because she cannot get a loan for a tractor; the pastoralist searching for land to graze her animals during a prolonged drought, unaware of the climate-adaptive grass seeds that her male peers are using; and the girl who cannot inherit the family farm because local law does not recognize her equal inheritance rights.

The good news? When women farmers have access to the financing, education, land, and resources they need to thrive, the benefits extend far beyond individual women, reaching their families, communities, and even the world at large.

Closing gender gaps in wages and productivity in agriculture would mean a USD 1 trillion boost to the global economy (raising global gross domestic product 1 per cent), according to research by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

It would also reduce food insecurity for 45 million people worldwide – FAO’s “conservative estimate.”

And it would build on the knowledge, leadership, and contributions of women and girls who are already caring for land, water, seeds, biodiversity, and communities.

UN Women recognizes that agriculture, food production, climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation are deeply intertwined with gender inequality.

Building on our long-standing partnerships with women’s rights advocates and organizations, rural women, farmers, activists, governments, and development actors, UN Women works to bring about lasting change – to the benefit of entire societies.

UN Women’s feminist approach to climate-resilient agriculture, food systems, and the right to food calls for actions to:

• Strengthen women’s income security and the tools to sustain their livelihoods, including training, financing, and technology, as well as social protections to see them through crises. 
• Expand women’s voice, agency, and leadership. Whether in the home, on the farm, or within national and global institutions, women’s influence in decision-making is essential for equality.
• Advance gender-responsive laws, policies, normative frameworks, and institutions. This requires addressing women’s rights to land, natural resources, and economic opportunities.
• Recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work. Unequal care responsibilities remain a major constraint on women’s economic opportunities.
• End discriminatory social norms. Address the gender inequalities within homes and societies that hold women and girls back and deprive them of equal opportunities.

In practice, UN Women’s work towards these goals includes training local stakeholders on gender-responsive approaches to grant distribution; hosting leadership-development programmes for women interested in forming cooperatives; and promoting the tools and education women farmers want to increase their incomes and food security – like seed-saving techniques, methods for making organic fertilizers, and soil and water conservation practices.