How the latest statistical standards improve knowledge about rural women’s work
21/10/2024 08:35 AM
Latest statistical standards improve our knowledge of the challenges and decent work deficits that women in rural areas face. Such knowledge is key to formulating effective policies that foster the women’s potential for growth and development.
Since 2008, every October 15th, we celebrate the International Day of Rural Women to shed light on their critical role in driving sustainable, agricultural, and rural development. As the backbone of many economic sectors in rural areas, they are key in achieving food security, improving livelihoods and shaping the future of families and rural communities.
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Despite their contribution, many women in rural areas face significant barriers, such as limited access to land and other productive resources, credit, healthcare services, education and social protection, to name a few. Furthermore, many women in rural areas are trapped in low-skilled, low-productivity and low-paid jobs with poor working conditions, including exposure to violence and harassment. They also often lack voice and face difficulties in upholding their rights and are under-represented in workers’ and employers’ organizations as well as other rural organizations. All these disadvantages are underpinned by gender-based inequality, discrimination, and cultural and social norms. Women in rural areas are also very diverse, which calls for an intersectional lens, combining disaggregation by sex, location and other characteristics, when studying their situations.
Rural sectors such as agri-food, forestry, aquaculture, and tourism, have great potential for job creation and sustainable enterprise development, serving as a key source of decent jobs for women. The potential and the challenges of the rural economy must be considered through a gender-sensitive perspective. Furthermore, current trends such as urbanization, demographic shifts, climate change, and technological advancements are changing the gender dynamics of work in rural economies.
To understand the challenges and decent work deficits faced by women in rural areas and to foster their potential for growth and development, we need good data. The basic concepts and definitions historically used in labour statistics carried an inherent bias which misrepresented (or even hid) work done by women, especially in rural areas. To counter this (among other reasons) the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) adopted in 2013 a new foundational framework for work statistics. Subsequent ICLSs built on that foundation to update and improve the statistical standards on work relationships (in 2018) and informality (in 2023).
These new statistical standards are particularly relevant for the work of women in rural areas, which can now be more accurately depicted and understood. The increased knowledge will inform social dialogue and help develop better targeted policies to advance women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in rural areas.
Read on to discover how the new standards can shake the status quo, and what we know so far about the labour market situation of women in rural areas.
The 19th ICLS standards introduced a new definition of employment, narrower compared to the one previously used (adopted by the 13th ICLS), and a forms-of-work framework comprised of five distinct forms of work (employment, own-use production work, unpaid trainee work, volunteer work, and other work activities). The old definition of employment included some own-use production work such as subsistence agriculture, thereby mixing under the same category people in very different situations. The new employment definition covers exclusively paid work (work for pay or profit), while own-use production work and other forms of work are meant to be measured separately. The separate identification of paid and unpaid forms of work enables a more accurate representation of the labour market and people’s working situation and conditions. The impact of the new narrower employment definition will depend on the context: excluding own-use production from employment has a bigger impact in countries and contexts where own-use production is common. This means the new standards are particularly relevant for rural women in developing countries, giving visibility to gendered patterns in terms of forms of work in rural areas.
Using old (13th ICLS) definitions, globally, participation in employment is higher in rural areas than urban ones. The global urban employment-to-population ratio of 56.5 per cent is below the rural ratio of 58 per cent. This geographical pattern is driven by men: the male urban employment-to-population ratio is 66.8 per cent compared to a much higher rural ratio of 72.1 per cent. On the contrary, women’s participation in employment is stronger in urban areas, with a female urban ratio of 46.4 per cent compared to a rural ratio of 43.6 per cent.
There are, however, regional discrepancies to account for. Africa is the only region where women’s employment-to-population ratio is higher in rural areas than urban ones, while for men, this happens in Africa, Americas, and Asia and the Pacific.
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