EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The feminization of agriculture or the feminization of agrarian distress? Tracking the trajectory of women in agriculture in India

Itishree Pattnaik, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Stewart Lockie and Bill Pritchard

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 2018, vol. 23, issue 1, 138-155

Abstract: The rising share of farm work in India undertaken by women – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the feminization of agriculture – raises questions about the changing character of rural India, particularly with regards to women's social and economic roles. Based on an analysis of four sets of occupational data drawn from the Indian Census (1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011), this paper demonstrates that, as a process driven largely by the outmigration of men from rural areas, the feminization of agriculture has no necessary relationship with wider INDICATORS of women's social or economic empowerment. Instead, women's growing participation in agriculture appears to be strongly related to several indicators of poverty. This paper concludes that women's growing contribution of labour in agriculture adds to the already heavy work burdens of most rural women, thereby further undermining their well-being, and suggests that the feminization of agriculture may better be described as the feminization of agrarian distress.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13547860.2017.1394569 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjapxx:v:23:y:2018:i:1:p:138-155

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjap20

DOI: 10.1080/13547860.2017.1394569

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy is currently edited by Leong Liew

More articles in Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst (chris.longhurst@tandf.co.uk).

 
Page updated 2024-07-04
Handle: RePEc:taf:rjapxx:v:23:y:2018:i:1:p:138-155