FAO: Calls to “grow equality” for women underpin editorial output

From fisheries and aquaculture, where women make up half of the workforce, but are disproportionately engaged in the least stable and lowest paid jobs; to land agriculture, where women will often work the fields, but not own them; to the gendered experience of climate change and its impacts, deep inequality persists. And this, despite evidence that – affront to human rights aside – inequality makes no economic sense, and erodes food security in the process. Mass investment in women is needed, both to even out the score and boost global GDP.

“Women may not be systematically excluded from high-value, export-oriented value chains or from entrepreneurship, but their participation is usually constrained by discriminatory social, norms and barriers to knowledge, assets, resources and social networks,” FAO says in its latest overview of The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems. Conversely, closing the pay and productivity gap in farming would add nearly USD 1 trillion to global GDP and take as many as 45 million people out of hunger.

This is the first assessment of this magnitude since 2011 – and more detailed and complex than it could ever be at the time. Some very specific areas did see improvement over the period, the report concedes; many, it argues, did not.

An evolving awareness, but also the unprecedented availability of sex-disaggregated data, account for the adoption of a much finer gender lens in recent years in FAO's publications. Browse the  FAO − Gender website or flick through the latest  publications catalogue for more on the topic.