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.
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.
From the 19th ICLS: The gender gap in employment is wider 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.
While these estimates (based on old standards) provide some information on rural and urban labour markets, they fail to convey the improved knowledge gained from analysing separately paid work (employment under the new definition) and own-use production work. For instance, excluding own-use production work from employment would certainly have a big impact on the very high employment participation of rural women in Africa cited above.
Encouragingly, more and more countries are implementing the 19th ICLS standards, and eventually, it will become possible to have global and regional estimates based on them.
In the meantime, we can check the impact of the new standards on the depiction of rural labour markets in a few countries that have implemented them. From the data available on 18 countries, we note that the adoption of the new standards had no or minimal impact on the employment-to-population ratio in all high-income countries covered, while in the remaining countries, the impact was more significant (sometimes substantial). The difference between the lower employment-to-population ratio based on new standards and the higher employment-to-population ratio based on old standards reflects the participation in unpaid own-use production activities previously considered employment. In 14 out of these 18 countries, the employment-to-population ratio was higher in rural areas than in urban ones according to previous standards, whereas this remains true in only 7 of them when using the new standards, highlighting the relevance of the new standards for rural economies. We also notice a remarkable difference when moving from old to new standards on the employment-to-population ratio for women in rural areas. Indeed, the impact of the change in standards is larger for women in rural areas than for the total economy in 12 out of these 18 countries, the exceptions being mainly high-income countries where there was no impact either for rural women or for the total economy.
Many women in rural areas have a key role as subsistence farmers and subsistence producers. Under the new standards, these activities are not being considered employment but measured separately. People involved in subsistence agriculture will be considered employed if they also have a paid job. In fact, under the new standards, we can highlight the simultaneous performance of multiple types of work, particularly relevant to understanding gender gaps and the total work burden of women in multiple forms of paid and unpaid work, especially in agriculture and rural areas.
From the 20th ICLS: Unveiling the economic risks faced by rural women
As many rural labour markets are experiencing transformative shifts, it is important to grasp how the employment relationships are evolving and assess the respective gendered patterns. The classification of jobs by status in employment gives insights into the type of economic risk workers face in their activity (e.g., job security, wage stability) and the authority they have over other workers or establishments (e.g., dependent or independent workers). It is, therefore, a key indicator of job quality.
In 2018, the 20th ICLS updated the International Classification of Status in Employment (ICSE-93) to better reflect changing work relationships and the blurring boundary between paid employment and self-employment. To that end, it adopted the ICSE-18, which provides a more detailed picture of the different work relationships and the flexibility to organize status in employment categories by two dimensions, namely: the type of authority the worker has over the organization of the work and the economic unit, and the type of economic risk to which a worker is exposed. The ICSaW-18 classification was also introduced to enable the classification by status of activities other than employment. Once again, these two new classifications are particularly for better depicting the nuances of women’s work in rural economies.
According to the former classification (ICSE-93), globally, 67 per cent of employed women were employees in urban areas, compared to 34 per cent in rural areas. Working as an employee is generally associated with more security and a lesser economic risk. While the shares of employees in rural areas are similar for men and women, these figures could hide diverse regional patterns. There is a gendered distinction in the most prevalent status among the self-employed in rural areas. While 38 per cent of employed women in rural areas are own-account workers and 27 per cent are contributing family workers, 51 per cent of employed men are own-account workers and 9 per cent are contributing family workers. These patterns call for attention to women contributing family workers in rural areas to strengthening their access to income-generating opportunities associated with decent work conditions. The ICSE-18 better captures if they participate in essential decision-making related to the farm or the rural family enterprise, which is relevant for policy design. As more countries implement it, the detail about the type of authority and economic risks faced by rural women workers will help in developing better-targeted interventions, especially for women in vulnerable situations.
From the 21st ICLS: The prevalence of informality among rural women requires attention
Informality, which can put workers at a higher risk of vulnerability and inadequate working conditions, is particularly pervasive in rural areas. In fact, in around 91 per cent of the 117 countries with data, the informality rate is higher for rural areas than urban ones, both for women and men. Also, in 70 per cent of these, the informality rate is higher for women than men, although the average difference is rather small. The nature of informality is just as important as its prevalence: for women, the informal nature of their jobs is often associated with them being contributing family workers, whereas for men it is typically the characteristics of their own-account worker or employee jobs which determine their informality. Rural women in informal employment are not entitled to social protection, and can be exposed to poor or hazardous working conditions, low remuneration and productivity, and a lack of organization, voice and representation in decision-making.
In 2023, the 21st ICLS adopted a resolution updating and improving measurement standards on the informal economy, to reflect latest world of work developments and to align them to the 19th and 20th ICLS standards. The 21st ICLS standards recognize that there is informality in all countries, across both formal and informal sectors, as well as in households, regardless of their level of income and development. They provide operational definitions of the formal sector, informal sector, and household own-use and community sector, based on the formal status of the economic unit and the intended destination of the production. Additionally, they introduce the concept of “informal productive activities” which includes all productive activities carried out by persons or economic units that are not covered by formal arrangements, recognizing that productive activities can be “partly” informal. Previously, it was accepted to exclude agriculture from informality measurements, mainly due to data collection challenges. However, the new standards provide solutions to overcome such challenges in order to include agriculture in the measurement, thereby ensuring the recognition and visibility of informality in all economic activities. This change is particularly relevant in rural areas. From a gender perspective, the framework calls for a systematic disaggregation of the indicators by sex, as well as for the production of specific gender-relevant indicators, such as the gender pay gap and rime spent on unpaid domestic and care work. These new standards will enable the formulation of more effective strategies supporting the transition to formality of women in rural areas.
Other challenges and way forward
Rural women face many disadvantages, and the new statistical standards are a great step towards addressing them, by making them visible to analysts and policymakers. All these improvements in rural labour statistics will help reveal their multiple roles and actual impact on rural economies. This understanding is vital to improve the working and living conditions of women and harness the potential for decent work in rural areas. With better statistics, we can ensure their contributions are recognized and promote more effective policies to advance towards gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.
