Women who work in agriculture face significant inequalities, and the climate crisis is only making the situation worse.

That’s the conclusion of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s first report in more than a decade focusing on women who work in agrifood systems.

“Women who work in agricultural production tend to do so under highly unfavourable conditions,” the authors wrote in the report, released Thursday. “They tend to be concentrated in the poorest countries, where alternative livelihoods are not available, and they maintain the intensity of their work in conditions of climate-induced weather shocks and in situations of conflict.”

The report, “The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems,” is much more comprehensive than a similar report from 2011, FAO’s Deputy Director of Inclusive Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Dr. Lauren Phillips, who helped prepare the report, told Carbon Brief. Instead of focusing solely on women in the narrower agricultural field, it looks at women who work in all agrifood systems, which it defines as “the entire range of actors and interlinked activities that add value in agricultural production and related off-farm activities such as food storage, aggregation, post-harvest handling, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal, and consumption.”

Agricultural production, on the other hand, refers only to the raising, growing and harvesting of crops, livestock, fisheries and forests.

The field is important to many women’s livelihoods, employing 36 percent of all working women as of 2019. In some regions — especially sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia — it provides the bulk of their livelihood, with 66 percent of working women employed in agriculture in the former vs. 60 percent of working men, and 71 percent of working women employed in agriculture in the latter vs. 47 percent of men.

Yet women are not treated fairly in the field.

Women who work in agriculture make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, and female farmers produce 24 percent less than male farmers on the same amount of land.

There are several reasons why these inequalities persist, including discrimination, strict gender norms, lack of access to land and technology and a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work in the home. But the status quo means that women in agriculture are more vulnerable when extraordinary events like the COVID-19 pandemic or a climate-fueled heat wave occur.

Following the pandemic, 22 percent of women working in non-farm agrifood systems lost their jobs compared to just two percent of men, and this meant that women faced 4.3 percent more food insecurity than men in 2021 compared to 1.7 percent more in 2019. When a climate-fueled extreme weather event like a heat wave occurs, women are more likely to continue working through it.

Read the full article about women agricultural workers by Olivia Rosane at EcoWatch.