Are Women Taking over the Farm in China?

Alan de Brauw ()

Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: Development practitioners in the West have proclaimed that a ``feminization of agriculture'' is occurring in the developing world. In this paper, I use household survey data collected in rural China to empirically test whether or not women have been doing an increasing amount of farmwork. I find exactly the opposite-- if anything, the proportion of farmwork being done by women is declining over the late 1990s. Furthermore, I analyze the demographic composition of the farm labor force and find that the future feminization of agriculture is unlikely.

Keywords: Women; agriculture; China; farm labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q12 O12 J16 J43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-06
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