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Gender, food security and nutrition

In 2022, global hunger, measured by the prevalence of undernourishment, impacted around 9.2 percent of the world's population, consistent with 2021 figures but markedly higher than the 7.9 percent in 2019, pre-COVID-19 pandemic (FAO SOFI 2023). An estimated 735 million individuals faced hunger in 2022, a significant increase of approximately 122 million since 2019 (FAO SOFI 2023).

Approximately 2.4 billion people, or 29.6 percent of the global population, were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022 (FAO SOFI 2023). Around 900 million people (11.3 percent of the global population) faced severe food insecurity, with the prevalence of food insecurity remaining unchanged for the second consecutive year after a sharp rise from 2019 to 2020 (FAO SOFI 2023). In 2022, malnutrition in all its forms remained a global challenge. An estimated 148.1 million children under five were stunted (22.3 percent), 45 million were wasted (6.8 percent), and 37 million overweight (5.6 percent food insecurity, and malnutrition). The world is clearly not on track in achieving Zero Hunger and, if recent trends continue, the number of hungry people will rise due to conflicts, climate change, extreme weather events and pandemics.

Women and men play distinct roles in maintaining the four pillars of food security: as food producers, household gatekeepers, and managers of food stability during economic hardship. Women are pivotal in ensuring the nutritional security of their households, though their contributions are often overlooked in policy and legal frameworks, limiting their potential in enhancing food security.

Gender inequalities and gender norms restrict women’s access to resources and services, such as land, knowledge, and food, leading to poverty and food and nutrition insecurity. Vulnerable women, particularly in female-headed households, face limited access to nutrition information and resources, making them more susceptible to food shortages, food insecurity, and malnutrition. The gender gap in food insecurity continued to rise in 2022, with 27.8 percent of women experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity, compared to 25.4 percent of men (FAO SOFI 2023). Malnutrition in mothers can initiate a deprivation cycle, impacting child mortality, disease, educational performance, and work productivity. Educational attainment in women significantly influences child survival rates.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has a mandate to eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, and supports countries in translating their political commitment to the 2030 Agenda through concrete actions. FAO's interventions address food security and nutrition, focusing on gender equality and equal access to resources, employment, advisory and other services, and markets. The organization promotes gender equality in policies, programs, and legal frameworks, strengthening national and governmental institutions' capacities for gender equality and empowerment. Community-level efforts involve gender-responsive projects and programs.

  • Empowering women and closing the gender gap in agriculture and food systems are crucial to eradicating hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, and achieving SDG 2: Zero Hunger by 2030.
  • Globally and regionally, women are slightly more food insecure than men.
  • Ensuring women's food security, nutrition, income, and employment opportunities is vital for increasing productivity, improving health, and enhancing the well-being of families and households.
  • Women's empowerment positively impacts child and maternal health, leading to improved nutrition.

  • Advocate for gender equality issues in international and national policy dialogues, so that women and girls can be empowered and all forms of malnutrition can be eradicated.
  • Design gender-responsive interventions with the aim of providing women and men with the same access to food, productive resources, education, decision-making power and economic opportunities along food value chains.
  • Strengthen the capacities of national institutions to collect and use sex-disaggregated data, in order to build a strong evidence base that can guide the design of adequate gender-responsive policies, strategies, laws and programmes, and monitor the gender impacts of food security and nutrition.
  • Identify and combat existing gender stereotypes and discriminatory gender norms affecting food security, nutrition and agriculture.
  • Target both women and men in nutrition education and training programmes on food production, aggregation, processing, distribution and marketing, as well as support behavioral change for food waste reduction and healthy dietary habits for gender-equitable consumption practices.
  • Recognize women’s unpaid care and productive work and adopt tailored measures to address their work burden and support the equal distribution of unpaid care and domestic work.

FAO-led Dimitra Clubs have engaged both women and men in initiatives targeting food security and nutrition. They have contributed to changing people’s behaviours in terms of diet, alleviating food taboos, ameliorating agricultural practices and choice of crops, and cultural practices that reinforced inequalities. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, through the Dimitra Clubs, members – women and men – were able to discuss and change 30 different food taboos that were affecting women’s nutrition.

To assess the nutrient intakes of women of reproductive age (WRA, aged 15–49 years), FAO and partners developed the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women indicator, which is a dichotomous indicator of whether or not WRA have consumed at least five out of ten defined food groups the previous day or night. This is a proxy indicator for measuring the higher micronutrient adequacy, an important dimension of diet quality. It is the only standardized indicator focusing on women. It is now being used in many countries and increasingly integrated into large-scale surveys, such as the Demographic Health Survey.

The FAO/World Health Organization (WHO) Global Individual Food Consumption Data Tool (FAO/WHO GIFT) gathers and disseminates existing dietary data from all countries around the world. Data, shared through FAO/WHO GIFT, are age- and sex disaggregated to ensure that food and nutrient intakes highlight population groups of concern. The platform provides data to support policy-makers, programme planners, non-governmental organization staff and many other stakeholders, in taking informed and gender-responsive decisions to improve health and nutrition.