Gender and Food security refers to how gender inequality shapes access to food, nutrition, and agricultural resources at global, national and household levels. Women play a central role in food production, particularly in developing countries, but often face structural barriers to land ownership, credit, technology, and decision-making power. These inequalities limit agricultural productivity and contribute to higher risks of food insecurity, especially among women and female-headed households.
Gender disparities affect all dimensions of food security, including food availability, access, utilization, and stability as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Women access to land, markets, and financial resources remains more limited than men's while unequal division of unpaid labor and time constraints further restrict their participation in economic activities. Intra-household dynamics, including differences in bargaining power and resource allocation, also shape food distribution and nutritional outcomes.
Emerging challenges such as climate change, economic shocks, and conflict often disproportionately impact women due to existing inequalities in resource access and decision-making. Research from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank emphasizes that closing gender gaps in agricultue and strengthening women's land right, access to resources, and participation in policy processes can improve food security, enchance resilience, and reduce global hunger.
Availability
According to the World Food Summit of 1996, food availability is defined as sufficient quantities of foods available on a consistent basis. Women play an important role in food production, processing, distribution and marketing. They often work as unpaid family workers, are involved in subsistence farming and represent about 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, varying from 20% in Latin America to 50% in Eastern and Southeastern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, women face discrimination in access to land, credit, technologies, finance and other services. Empirical studies suggest that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, women could boost their yields by 20–30%; raising the overall agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4%. While those are rough estimates, the significant positive impact of closing the gender gap on agricultural productivity cannot be denied.
Access to land
Women's ability to own or inherit land is restricted in much of the developing world. Even in countries where women are legally permitted to own land, such as Uganda, research from Women's Land Link Africa shows that cultural norms and customs have excluded them from obtaining land ownership in practice.Women’s Land Link Africa. (2010). "The Impact of National Land Policy and Land Reform On Women in Uganda". WLLA. 1–8. Globally, women own less than 20% of agricultural land."Women Farmers: Change and Development Agents". 2011. Prepared by World Rural Forum with Alexandra Spieldoch for World Conference on Family Farming. Typically, in most of the developing countries, a woman's use of land is restricted to temporary cultivation rights, allocated to her by her husband, and in exchange, she provides food and other goods for the household. She is not able to pass the land on to her heirs nor she will be entrusted with the land if her husband dies; the land is automatically granted to her husband's family or any male children the couple may have produced. Bina Agarwal, a development economist known for her work on women's property rights, states "the single most important factor affecting women’s situation is the gender gap in command over property."Agarwal, Bina (1994). A field of one's own: gender and land rights in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. p. 576. , 0-521-42926-9. Retrieved 2012-02-14. Agarwal claims that in many cases, rural women demand land rights, but she also confirms that some cases exist in which women do not identify land rights as a major problem. On the other hand, Cecile Jackson objects the claim of Agarwal on the ground that it is important to focus on gendering land questions instead of treating land issues only in terms of land rights of women as Agarwal does. Gendering land questions requires more ethnographic research of social relations around land.
Increasingly, as land privatization leads to the end of communal lands, women find themselves unable to use any land not bestowed upon them by their families, rendering unmarried women and widows vulnerable. Many women still face legal hurdles when attempting to acquire land through inheritance or the marketplace. In order to reorganize post-colonial societies, SADC states have engaged in land redistribution and resettlement programs, ranging from temporary lease-holding to permanent property rights. Even in cases where no gender bias is officially present in land redistribution policy, social custom permits officials to favor male-headed households and individual men over female-headed households and individual women.
Women in agricultural households remain significantly disadvantaged in landownership compared with men; half the countries reporting on Sustainable Development Goal Indicator 5.a.2 have weak legal protections for women’s land rights. The percentage of men who have ownership or secure tenure rights over agricultural land is twice that of women in more than 40 percent of the countries that have reported on women’s landownership (Sustainable Development Goal Indicator 5.a.1), and a larger percentage of men than women have such rights in 40 of 46 countries reporting. Even so, the share of women among landowners increased in 10 of 18 countries over the last decade, with marked improvements in several decade, with marked improvements in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), closing the gender gaps in landownership and secure tenure is particularly important as secure land rights have multiple positive impacts. The FAO (2023) report further emphasizes that women's insecure land rights are part of broader structural inequalities across Agrifood Systems. The report highlights that strengthening women's tenure security improves not only agricultural production, but also household, food, security, resilience, and gender equality outcomes. Gaps can be narrowed through a combination of implementing reforms on land registration, increasing land-rights awareness and access to community-based legal aid, and fostering women’s participation in local land institutions. Additionally, services (such as extension) and resources (such as technology) must be designed with women’s needs in mind.
Enhancing women’s rights to own or have secure tenure over agricultural land has positive impacts on empowerment, investment, natural-resource management, access to services and institutions, resilience and food security, reducing gender-based violence and increasing women’s bargaining power.
Division of unpaid labor and time constraints
Particularly in rural areas, the use of women's time in agriculture is often constrained by obligations such as fetching water and wood, preparing meals for their families, cleaning, and tending to children and livestock. For example, in Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia women expend most of their energy on load-carrying activities involving transport of fuel-wood, water, and grain for grinding.Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook, World Food Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and International Fund for Agricultural Development (2009)
The gendered division of labor in agriculture has been known to create unequal household power dynamics, responsibilities, and benefits from agriculture.
Women’s greater burden of unpaid domestic and care work, such as cleaning, cooking and caring for household members, contributes to inequalities in labour-market participation and outcomes. This is particularly evident in low- and middle-income countries. In rural areas, women’s unpaid-work burden is greater than that of men in large part because of the time they spend collecting water. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the disproportionate burden women shoulder in unpaid care of children and other family members and the implications of this burden for women’s time and employment.
Access to markets Constraints to mobility and time, gendered divisions of labor as well as cultural and social norms hamper the access of women to markets. Women tend to be engaged in the production of traditional and subsistence crops offering less opportunities to benefit from market income; however, self-consumption might also be a conscious choice. Within the household women often have little decision-making power related to marketing and selling activities as well as over the spending of the money earned, although they often contribute considerably amounts of time to the production. For example, in parts of India women have to ask permission of their husbands to follow market activities. Engaging in markets offers opportunities like organic agriculture and collectives of landless women in Kenya used revenues from selling bananas and vegetables on local markets to compensate for shortfalls in their wages at coffee plantations. But reliance on markets also increases exposure to international market fluctuations, while women farmers are mainly smallholders and often unable to profit from export opportunities. In the Philippines, potato farmers felt the negative impacts of global market integration when imported potatoes cut market prices by half.
Access to technology, training, and infrastructure A gendered role of women hinders access to technology, agricultural training, and rural infrastructure. Women's success in food security in most countries revolves around their reach to equal resources as men in aforementioned sectors. Women's limited access to technology resulted in the failure to address women's time constraints to agricultural activities. Moreover, agricultural training marginalizes women as they are normally conceived as farmwives rather than farmers. Rural infrastructure includes transport, energy, information and communication technologies. Women's access to infrastructure eases their burden of agricultural and domestic activities as well as encourages their participation in farming. However, privatization of infrastructure services hindered rural women and children from escaping poverty traps which constrain their ability to sustainably produce food for themselves and for market. The Center for Women's Global Leadership writes that "trade liberalization policies have increased their work burden and undermined their right to food."
Access to finance