Rural women play a fundamental role in rural communities around the world providing care and being involved in number of economic pursuits such as subsistence farming, petty trading and off-farm work. In most parts of the world, rural women work very hard but earn very little.
Women often suffer discrimination because they are not allowed to have the same ownership of land as men. Most of what they earn does not directly stay in their control, because of unequal gender roles or discrimination.
Empowering rural women can help not only with alleviating the poverty of individual women and families, but also with empowering the entire community—changing access to education, employment and other benefits of rural development. To recognize this, the international community often sets international development goals that track investment and impact on lives of rural women, and the United Nations sponsors the International Day of Rural Women.
Poverty
Rural women are particularly disadvantaged, both as poor and as women.
Women in both rural and urban areas face a higher risk of poverty and more limited economic opportunities than their male counterparts.
[Haynie, Dana L. and Gorman, Bridget K. 1999. “A Gendered Context of Opportunity: Determinants of Poverty across Urban and Rural Labor Markets” The Sociological Quarterly , Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 177-197.] The number of rural women living in extreme poverty rose by about 50 percent over the past twenty years.
Women in rural poverty live under the same harsh conditions as their male counterparts, but experience additional cultural and policy biases which undervalue their work in both the informal, and if accessible, formal labor markets.
[World Survey. 2009. “Access to Land, Housing and Other Productive Resources.” Chapter 3, pp. 27–40, and Chapter 4, pp. 41-46] The 2009 World Survey states that "women play an active role in agriculture and rural livelihoods as unpaid family labour, independent farmers and wage labour, often without access to land, credit and other productive assets."
Women's contribution to the rural economy is generally underestimated, as women perform a disproportionate amount of care work that often goes unrecognized because it is not seen as economically productive.[UNICEF. 2007. "Equality in Employment," in The State of the World's Children. New York: United Nations Children’s Fund. Chapter 3, pp. 37–49.] Though in some nations cultural and societal norms prevent women from working outside the home, in other countries, especially in rural communities in Africa, women work as major food producers, improving household food and income security.
Role in agricultural communities
Feminization of agriculture
Impact on food security
See also
-
Discrimination against people from rural areas
Further reading
-
Ganle, John Kuumuori, Kwadwo Afriyie, and Alexander Yao Segbefia. "Microcredit: Empowerment and disempowerment of rural women in Ghana." World development 66 (2015): 335-345. online
-
Iwashima, Fumi. "Making and unmaking of housework in Rural Japan." Japanese Political Economy 48.2-4 (2022): 107-128. online
-
Hershatter, Gail. The gender of memory: Rural women and China’s collective past (Univ of California Press, 2011) online.
-
Jain, Paras, et al. "Women education in rural India." International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (IJSSH) 1.1 (2017): 21-26. online
-
Oppenheim Mason, Karen. "The impact of women's social position on fertility in developing countries." Sociological forum 2#4 (1987) online
-
Sachs, Carolyn E. Gendered fields: Rural women, agriculture, and environment (Routledge, 2018) in USA. online.
-
Weber, Bruce, et al. "A critical review of rural poverty literature: Is there truly a rural effect?." International regional science review 28.4 (2005): 381-414. online
-
Wyman, Andrea. Rural women teachers in the United States (1997) online
