According to some historians and anthropologists, it is to the Paleolithic period and the invention of agriculture that we owe the origin of gender inequalities. The transition from the relatively egalitarian model of hunter-gatherers to one based on the domestication of plants and animals would have favoured a distribution of tasks, functions and spaces separating women and men according to an order that would be hierarchical. Where are we 10 millennia later ?

We take stock of the place of women in agriculture.

How many women work in agriculture ?

According to the FAO, women represent 43% of the agricultural workforce in the world. At the level of developing countries, this rate rises to 60%. In some geographical areas, it is even higher : 70% in South Asia, 85% in rural India...

However, in many countries, data are difficult to establish and stabilize due to the large share of informal employment in the developing world in general and in the agriculture sector in particular. According to the ILO, agriculture accounts for the largest share of the non-criminal informal economy: 90% of the world's agricultural employment is informal !

The informality of agricultural employment is largely linked to specific characteristics of this economic sector: the legacy of a family-based structure has long favoured the invisibilisation of actors other than the owner. In France, the status of spouse-collaborator created in 1980 allows the life partners of farmers to access social rights (including retirement) and it has the merit of making visible all the peasant wives who were long counted as housewives even though they worked the farm on a daily basis. Today, in France, women represent 30% of the permanent workforce in the agricultural sector, 27% of farm managers. On the other hand, only 17% of them are employees.

More trained than ever, but...

The low share of women in agriculture is paradoxical in that girls are very well represented in agricultural training. They account for 50% of the students in agricultural technical education and 61% in higher education in the sector. Agricultural engineering schools are also those with the most girls : 59% compared to 23% for all engineering schools. As for veterinary schools, they score 74% of girls.

But behind these overall figures, it should be noted that there is an over-representation of girls (82%) in the " personal services" specialities of agricultural training: provided in rural areas, in agricultural establishments, these training courses do not lead to jobs in agriculture. If we stick to the strict share of specialties leading to agricultural production, girls represent only 37% of classes. And if we count the share of apprentices working on farms, they are only 20%. In other words, we lose a significant number of women between those who obtain the diplomas necessary to work in the heart of the agricultural professions and those who actually work there.

Where are they ? They are more likely than their male counterparts in initial training to go into the processing professions, putting their workforce at the service of manufacturers in the agri-food sector. They are also found in the local civil service and a certain number complete their training or retrain early to join the medico-social sector. Does this mean that they are fleeing the work of the farms and fields en masse?

The rural exodus of women

The first reason why women are not very present in agricultural professions and why they " prefer " more urban jobs even when they have agricultural diplomas, is the unemployment rate they suffer. In rural areas, women are twice as likely to be unemployed as men. As far as agricultural jobs are concerned, they are almost 20% less likely to have access to them.

Does this mean that the agricultural employer has deep-rooted gender biases ? The sociologist Hélène Guétat-Bernard, attached to ENSFEA, author of the book Féminin-Masculin – Genre et agricultures familiales, highlights a permanence of the gendered distribution of spaces and functions on farms that can hinder the employment of women at their level of qualification. Even if they are qualified, able to do core agricultural work and are authorised to drive machines and handle phytosanitary products, women are more likely to be assigned to tasks traditionally assigned to farmers ' wives: milking, processing crops, sales, etc.

In addition, the impact of the confusion between professional and private space on the farm is more likely to re-anchor women in the agricultural world in domestic and family responsibilities than women who work in a place other than the place of family life. Thus, according to a study by the FNAB, 66% of women farmers are the only ones in the couple to take care of domestic tasks compared to 26% of women in the general population who are in the same situation.

To complete the picture of the harshness of peasant life for women, we must add the over-representation of the rural world in gender-based violence. A quarter of the calls received to 3919 (the toll-free alert number for domestic violence) come from rural areas (where only 33% of the general population is concentrated) and nearly 50% of femicides take place in rural areas.

All these reasons mean that women, especially when their level of training allows them to open up horizons of professional development, autonomy and social advancement, tend to desert the countryside.

And yet, the countryside cannot do without women...

The first consequence of the rural exodus of women is the celibacy of farmers. The funny side of this phenomenon can be read in the very existence of a reality TV show that promises farmers to find a companion who will agree to share their very special existence. But behind the entertainment, there is a real social concern. As early as 1962, Pierre Bourdieu was interested in it: his article Célibat et condition paysanne mainly attributed the low marriage of farmers to the issues of non-dilution of family assets. But 40 years later, he published Le bal des bachelors by adopting a completely different perspective : behind the marital misery of rural men, a whole crisis of peasant society is taking shape.

And the sociologist insists on the key role of women in making the link between the rural and urban worlds, bringing ideas from the cities into the countryside and playing the vectors of the modernization and transformation of peasant models, even in the ways of production. Proof of this is the driving role played by women at the turn of the twenty-first century in the commitment of farms in organic transition. Even today, there are significantly more women farmers in sustainable and organic agriculture than in so-called conventional agriculture.

On a global scale, the UN has long warned of the need to strengthen gender diversity in the agricultural world at a time of the challenge of feeding the entire planet under climate change and to accelerate gender equality in rural areas. According to the international organization's estimates, " if women working in agriculture had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase the yields of their farms by 20 to 30 percent, increasing the total agricultural production of their countries by 2.5 percent to 4 percent. This would reduce the number of hungry people in the world by about 12% to 17%." 

Clearly, agriculture cannot do without women.

How can we bring women back to the land ?

So how can we retain them in the rural world and include them fully in agricultural activity? A very comprehensive report by the Senate, made public in 2017, analyses in depth the causes of peasant desertion of women and recommends a number of ways to curb the phenomenon.

Among these avenues, we will retain :

• The issue of financing and aid for setting up : the rapporteurs of the parliamentary document believe that the systems in place are neither adapted to the condition of women (whose initial contributions, in particular, are lower than those of men) nor favourable to the agroecological transition. Public and private financing actors should therefore change their processes, their offers and their practices to better target women and sustainable production systems.

• The challenge of balancing life times: the geography of the rural world as well as the specific constraints of agricultural professions mean that childcare and periscolorary activities solutions designed for city life are largely unsuitable. There is therefore a whole social innovation project to be explored and deployed to facilitate work/life balance for parents in rural areas in a different way.

• The diversity of decision-making bodies and professional networks is also pointed out as a challenge to be met. Chambers of agriculture, trade unions, territorial committees and even local authorities suffer from a lack of women in their composition and a clear scarcity of women at their heads. However, it seems essential that these spaces, which are as much places where the orientations to structure territories are taken as places where individuals can network and strengthen their horizons of opportunity, be parity.

• Finally, we must work in a relevant way to raise awareness among all actors in the rural world of sexism and its effects on living and working conditions, on development, on collective dynamics and on the performance of the agricultural sector.