Conclusions

What can we conclude about the role of women in the rural economies of Latin America?

First, consider the evidence on trends in the rural population. There is a clear correlation between feminization of the rural population and male bias in international migration. It is precisely in those countries (Mexico and most of Central America) sending a greater proportion of males than females to live and work in the United States that the ratios of women to men living in the countryside are also increasing. In much of the rest of the region - where the costs associated with U.S. migration are significantly higher - the greater tendency of women to migrate internally and intra-regionally has continued to heighten the rural male sex ratios.

Turning to the evolution of the rural labour force, we again see significant differences among countries, even within the clear overall regional trend of increasing rates of rural female economic activity rates and greater representation within the rural workforce. For the region as a whole, approximately one-third of working-age women are considered economically active, and women make up over 25 percent of the total rural EAP. But rural female economic activity rates range from a low of 8 percent in Paraguay to a high of almost 40 percent in Brazil, and women as a percent of the rural EAP also vary from 9 to 32 percent. The highest rates of change in both female rural economic activity rates and female shares of the rural EAP over the past 20 years appear to be taking place in some of the countries that have most aggressively pursued the non-traditional agricultural export strategy, including Ecuador, Chile, Guatemala and Honduras.

Does feminization of the rural workforce necessarily translate into a feminization of agriculture? At the regional level, official statistics count only about one-third of economically active rural women as working in the agricultural sector. While these figures almost certainly underestimate women’s unpaid contributions to the family farm, it does seem to be the case that non-agricultural employment is relatively more important for rural women than it is for rural men. Nevertheless, at least some proportion of the increasing number of women in the rural labour market are working in agriculture, and some data indicate growing female shares of the agricultural labour force, again especially in countries with large non-traditional agricultural export sectors.

What explains the changing roles of women and men in the Latin American rural economy? A confluence of demographic, social and economic trends over the past 20 to 30 years has generated important changes in women’s relative abilities and needs to participate more visibly in their households’ livelihood strategies. Rural Latin American women are more highly educated and are having fewer children than they were 20 years ago; this gives them both the skills and the time to join the rural workforce. Female household headship in rural areas - both de jure and de facto as a result of male outmigration - is on the rise, with implications for women’s responsibilities to become the sole or primary economic providers for their children. Economic liberalization has provided incentives for families to intensify their use of unpaid (and female) labour to grow subsistence crops, and the expansion of non-traditional agricultural exports has created an unprecedented demand for rural women’s seasonal wage labour. Taken together, these changing economic and social circumstances have had important consequences for the extent and nature of women’s participation in the rural economies of the region.

Finally, what are the constraints faced by women as they play more and more active roles in achieving household food security, generating incomes and contributing to agricultural export earnings? It is well-known that gender gaps pervade both the rural labour and capital markets: labour markets are segregated, women are systematically paid less than men and it is more difficult for women to obtain access to credit.^[22] However, until recently, relatively less attention had been paid to the importance of women’s land rights as a source of both economic and social access and empowerment. Greater gender equality in two of the principal means by which women obtain access to land - inheritance and state-sponsored allocation and titling programmes - is therefore essential to enabling women to more effectively participate in the Latin American rural economy. The importance of non-farm employment, particularly low-productivity forms of self-employment, is also increasingly becoming recognized as a key source of independent income for rural women in Latin America. Rural gender policy therefore needs to pay greater attention to the human and financial capital constraints facing poor rural women as they attempt to piece together livelihoods from often marginal activities, as well as to the very real limitations placed on women’s economic activity by their domestic responsibilities.

Research on gender in the rural economies of Latin American has advanced substantially over the past couple of decades. Increasingly, national level data on key indicators such as rural employment and earnings are disaggregated by sex, allowing researchers and policymakers to identify the basic parameters of rural women’s involvement in the rural labour force. Greater gender awareness among agricultural researchers has led to better documentation of the nature of the gender division of labour in agriculture, and some national-level household surveys are collecting gender-disaggregated data on land ownership. However, a great deal remains to be done, both in terms of systematic data collection and with regard to policy-oriented analysis.

With regard to improving data for gender analysis of the rural economy, there are three priority areas: employment, land tenure and migration. National labour statistics continue to significantly underestimate rural women’s on- and off-farm self-employment. The ILO and the FAO have developed detailed recommendations for the improved collection of gender-disaggregated rural employment data from labour force surveys and agricultural censuses, respectively, the implementation of which would greatly enhance policymakers’ understanding of the scope and content of rural women’s contributions to the rural economy. It is also imperative that Latin American agricultural censuses begin to collect gender-disaggregated information on land ownership, rental and other forms of access to this key productive resource. Finally, population censuses and immigration statistics should be revised so that researchers can keep better track of internal and cross-border migratory flows by gender and by area of origin (i.e. rural vs urban).