Good afternoon colleagues and for those of you from out of town
it is my privilege to give you all a warm Hokie nation welcome to Virginia Tech
and Blacksburg. Thank you all for coming and I really am delighted that this conference is being
organized and I am most grateful for all the hard work that the Center for International
Research Education and Development has done over the last several months leading up to this event.
Before I repeat my very brief comments I want to get a sense of
how many people in this room have come from outside of Virginia if you would please stand up.
I have to tell you a couple of hours ago maybe about
48 hours ago I was on a plane coming back from New Delhi and I thought I should wear my traditional
Indian attire to this event and and then I saw Ozzie this afternoon and [inaudible]
70s and so on and as i was going to that part of my life i i always had aspirations about coming to
the U.S. and what was remarkable to me was that as a young man growing up in south Asia at that time
somehow a western university education just seemed out of reach in so many ways
and then right now the time I was 17 17 and a half 18
my mother and father did everything in their power to help me and propel me towards
to try to make my aspirations and dreams about having a western education come to life but the
single most important thing that's the third was my mother sold her engagement ring to put
me on a plane to be able to fly here to come and get an education so as we talk about the role of
gender and development I think it's fundamental to recognize the sacrifices that mothers and sisters
and daughters and arts and and pieces make in the lives of young men who sometimes have to rely
on on on the very people that have birthed them and have developed them and cultivated them
to be able to achieve their own dreams so I'm here today because of some tremendous
acts that were made by my family in the early part of the latter part of the 20th century
and when I had the privilege of coming to Virginia Tech about eight years ago it was remarkable
I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Maria Elisa Christie when I was interviewing for the position
of associate vice president of international affairs and I was in a room with about 30-40 of
colleagues from the center for international research educational development
and Maria Elisa never actually told the story she seemed so far away
she was totally uninterested in my candidacy
and of course was you know what I was thrilled about was she wasn't looking at a cell phone
and so many people tend to do these days when they're in class or they're doing something else
but what was remarkable was her the program that she represented meant so much it meant so much to
this university that they invested in it and after i became after i was in my role as associate VP
for two two and a half years failing miserably at that and as often as it happens universities tend
to promote you and so i became vice president in 2013 and Maria Elisa was on the search committee
interviewed me again and I thought i've got to figure out a way to captivate this woman
and she asked me one of the hardest questions that I have to do
and one of the things I've said to her was Maria Elisa in five to six years
we have to make women and gender in international development
and Virginia we had the forefront of U.S. higher education remember she wasn't paying attention
so I just want to say that this event has been planned and developed by Maria Elisa and a small
team of men and women around them and I just want to recognize a tremendous contribution and a small
things behind this contribution so those of you that have worked on this project please stand up
it's a slightly bigger thing
as you can tell i'm not from southwest Virginia and so just having this this vibrancy and this
this topic being discussed in this region of the world is I think fundamental and so important
to the work that we do here I'm also very very grateful for all of my colleagues at seaway and
those of you who just take a second to stand up and be recognized
the man powder is here and i will ask where to recognize his colleagues here
it's a small group of faculty and literally a text that intersects with
our center for international research education and development
and we have one of the largest portfolios of USAID funding amongst U.S. higher education institutions
I'm very grateful for the faculty and Virginia Tech that have over the last several decades
intersecting very very directly with our work at the center so those of you in this room would you
please stand up and be recognized as well and i'm sorry i'm going to lose one for uh please
have come guys embraced the development challenges
that our world faces and our university needs to engage in in truly very very important ways
because as we talk about being a global land-grant university campus the work that our faculty
staff our students and our graduate and undergraduate students do is found the right to
the success of this institution and its place in the world into making sure that we are developing
globally engaged globally competent and global leaders within our student body
so as you know the field of gender and development has been around for many many years one of the
things that really surprised me is that over the last several decades promises have been made
but action has been rather slow the time has come for
academics and policy makers to work together to make sure that we are pushing the agenda
at the international level and at the national level to make sure
that the promises made by governments all over the world
are being that they're being held accountable and that action and indeed legal obligations now are
going to be the future about how we begin to make progress in the area of gender and development
i was listening to a
U.N. leader of the area of general development some weeks ago
and she talked about this example of a young girl born into a poor household and the likelihood of
her being forced into early marriage which would more likely lead to her dropping out of school
and then giving birth at an early age and then she would suffer the complications of uh
early of childbirth and health complications as a result of childhood and then later on in
a life experience of violence and one of the things she talked about was that all of these
events are interconnected and interdependent and is incumbent upon scholars and researchers and
activists to make sure that they're paying attention to these events in isolation but
looking at the continuum of experiences and how we can engage in our scholarship as well as in our
activism to address these very very fundamental and poor challenges that
are being faced we also have to look at the way the world of work is changing in the 21st century
i am often asked since the office of economic development also designed a
portfolio of official international affairs um about what it means as we
in Virginia are confronting issues relating to the emergence of automation and robots into our
industrial lives and as more and more industries begin to get automated one of the byproducts of
that is realizing that robots don't pay taxes if you think about it it is the shrinking
workforce in the automotive sector around the world and the automatization of the workforce
in the auto sector is now going to be in so many different industries across our industrial world
and so it is extraordinarily important in the world of work to now begin to also realize
that domestic work and the domestic paying attention to the household
expanding the are actually fundamental work related employment related work that is that
needs to be compensated in the 21st century where just when an individual leaves the home and goes
to an employer's place of work to earn a living we need to look at that and we think that paradigm
whether we are taking care of the elderly whether we are taking care of our children
these fundamental activities have largely been under recognized by most nations around the world
in the 21st century i think we need to play a much more deliberate role in redefining that and making
sure that our all facets of our society are being paid adequately based on contribution that we are
making towards not just our professional lives but the development of human beings i think whether it
be male or female the role within the household is a productive role that has to be recognized
at a governmental level in multiple ways these are complex issues like complex solutions but
we and universities need to be thinking about these aspects of our of our lives as well i don't
need to give you all a lecture about the role of gender and development you are all experts in this
in this hall i just want to be um so express my my heartfelt thanks to everybody that has contributed
to this event my hope and Marie Elisa has told me that she doesn't want to do this ever again
away from her research in other words but i think many universities have a role to do this
on a regular basis and i at Virginia Tech amongst and all my colleagues that are in the
world of development work want to be able to do this on a regular basis
and we hope this is a journey that many of you will make and become a pilgrimage really and we
hope that all the walls on this side of the um indian Virginia Tech will be open as we begin
to expand this year afterwards so with that i'll stop again thank you for coming i wish you all a
marvelously rich vibrant and productive conference and um she has exceeded every expectation i had
i gave her a legal sum of money i really did and she raised almost double who i had given her
and i cannot tell you how industrious she has been um and it's extraordinary to see
when you make investments in people's fashion what comes out of it so i'm very careful thank you
so that's a good thing
for international research education development and i've been leading a team of mostly students
that students who are PhD students and students you've got a lot of other work that is not
confidence right you've been working this for months and we're all really excited to see you
here thank a quick you about our program the program that was first the women in development
program was established at Virginia Tech in 1982 with a state-funded director's position starting
in 1990 so we think that was the first one and i don't know in terms of a university and um and
then led by mary rojas who was our first director virginia tech became the home for away the
association of women and gender and international development and wasn't secretary until 1994.
you can hear more about us including that movement history on our website
and that's not the conference website but the janet development website okay so i need to
recognize Dr. Guru Ghosh, vice president for outreach and national affairs for his vision
his commitment to gender equality and his support for gender and international development research
it was his idea to take our monthly gender job discussion series it's a lot easier to
bring one speaker in a month he's did that for years he supported that it's got higher profile
international speakers and then last i think it's june 20 so what if i give you double the money
in the other conference and i said yeah right just think about it you don't have to do it but
and then i realized it was really a tremendous opportunity and it was the right thing to do and
there was a role that the university could play in that even though we're not watching pc where
many many meetings on gender national development happen every single week
and so really it was what can university do that could make convolution i would like to thank our
co-sponsors and contributors i'm not going to name them there's a big poster of them outside
it's also about your program that they are i went knocking on and they were all well some smaller
contributors are not but i'm just saying we didn't have a grant to do this there's a lot of different
departments that paid a little bit to make this happen so i really appreciate all of them
and i really want to thank our speakers all of our speakers who are coming here to contribute to this
conversation and particularly to contribute to students and that was you know the first
big stress i don't get people to come this congress has never happened before but you know
what there's this network and one person says that sounds interesting when you talk to another person
so we got this fire going and we just found this amazing lineup of secret and
it came from far away and some of them had like horrible travel our keynote for tomorrow
is stuck in the snow right now Boston but we'll arrive hopefully after midnight tonight and uh
and then we have we have poster presenters from all over the world and covering research on the
world you will have opportunities to engage with the speakers throughout the program every uh
keynote address and panel will have a question and answer discussion afterwards and we'll also
have a shift and share where you've got these two are i know you know three of our shifting
chairs here so we'll hear about that later but we have a table in each corner here where you'll
get to interact with people presenting there and tomorrow we'll have a career
panel and lunch so you'll be able to ask we've got a subset of one or six speakers
that are gonna present very very briefly and then you have a chance to ask them they have
selected them based on very different kinds of careers we'll have a workshop
and other presenters because we have amazing group of people here and i'm going to tell you a little
bit who's an audience because i thought you might want to know so besides our Tech students and
faculty and representatives from organizations we have students and faculty from 16 U.S. academic
institutions and six international academic institutions so for those of you with team
spirit i want to say that two universities that have the most people here University of Florida
uh tide our UC Davis UT Austin
bruce consultant and university Wisconsin Milwaukee and James Madison University
in a poster session we have 11 international poster presenters traveling from Canada
Benin Japan Kenya Peru Kyrgyzstan Philippines and Ghana and the research being presented in
the poster session covers work in 29 countries and four world regions we do have an undergrad
and grad post competition we'll announce the winners tomorrow at lunch so we have a lot of
experience in international development and gender issues here and so we really want to engage you
and invite you to participate in a discussion at q a after presentations but the goal of this
conference was to bring theory and practice together to really try to contribute something
from university perspective so we have critical approach to development especially our first
session is going to look critical towards the development we have researchers and practitioners
different kinds of uh people who participated in gender development dialogue and practice
we also wanted to focus on what we can bring to students so we've asked everybody to
really address their their methods in their presentations we have several workshops one
of them on participatory methods that'll be here and just for those of you who did not sign up for
a workshop it's the only one that has space left because you didn't expect 175 people registered
so we said the other routes with the other
two workshops the monitoring values and information and learning has a
so our goal is for everyone to learn from each other
and we do hope to foster networks and build relationships
i want to give a shout out to women's center who is celebrating their 25th anniversary this year
and organizes the women's month calendar which just pointed out uh sorry emma pointed out the
women's month calendar is actually seven weeks of activities okay so we've got a lot of stuff
and their edition has been for a quarter of a century to promote virginia tech community
a community that is safe equitable and supportive for women and it celebrates their experiences
achievements and diversity so we're very proud to be able to kick off the nets for women's month
a few housekeeping items we do have a gender neutral bathroom there's a sign form
you'll find the sign you can ask at the front desk we have a lactation room uh smithfield today and
uh couple barry towers on your program most of the sessions will be recorded by our wonderful
walters from university libraries back there so that means we do speak into the mics when
you are in the q a discussion and university libraries plays a key role to collect preserve and
disseminate knowledge the event capture services there's a lot of time that's going to go through
recording and then also editing at post production and they will be online at the university archives
uh within a few weeks afterwards we also have some communications today we stand up
and sarah communication people from sierra and courtney and i think erica you're going
to be doing some news who might be coming up to you and asking for a quick interview on
how you're doing how to conference this book so thank you see cameras
and then those of us that are part of this movie volunteers have little sneakers
and a lot of them are outside which is why they didn't stand up
so i will now introduce our first keynote speaker
dr carter davide i was very excited to have here i first met dr fernandez here in the last century
in the 1980s when i worked at research institute in vancouver
and she was already known as a world expert on women's access to land
in latin america so it's really amazing that she agreed to come and to present her knowledge and
beyond by america so doctor coming out of here is a distinguished professor america
of latin american studies and food and resource economics at the university of florida and an
honorary professor emeritus the latin american faculty of social sciences foxo where she teaches
she holds a phd in agricultural economics from the university of california berkeley
and an m.a development studies for the fletcher school of law and diplomacy
she was director of the university of florida center for latin american studies
and the director of the center for latin american caribbean and latino studies at
the university of massachusetts amherst where she was a professor of economics
she's been author of several books and articles so among them she's co-author of empowering women
land and property rights in latin america and has co-edited among her publications
she's co-added two special issues of feminist economics on women in distribution of wealth
and on gender and international migration her current research or recent research is on how
gender inequality and asset ownership affect household outcomes such as decision making
and intimate partner violence and on the factors that shape women's ability to accumulate
assets including property regimes and the role of remittances savings and access to credit
so we're going to hear from dr dear and then we'll have uh two of our team will be burning the
microphones you can raise panicky questions and comments but we'll also be tweeting and we'll be
telling you what to tweet into the field to fit your questions
healthy welcome doctor dave
good afternoon everyone and thank you for that very kind of production
um he brought up nicaragua in the 80s he was only a reminder of how long i've been talking
about women's access and ownership of land but today i'm bringing some good news i'm bringing
a view of the kind of progress that's been made over the of the last 10 years in particular
but it is a topic that really since 1970 during the first un conference on unwounded
we've been talking about and demanding better data and demanding policy reforms
as you'll see in my presentation today that's finally starting to to happen so
why focus on the sustainable development goals well in many ways we can think about the sdgs
as being one of the platforms where theory and practice come together the theme of this
conference and what they reflect is really the hard work of so many people over so many decades
to get to to where we are you know policymakers scholars practitioners and activists particularly
in the case of sdg5 our own sdt to achieve gender equality and power all women and girls
took a truly coalition you know people working at every single level right to be where we are
today i know some folks are cynics and write these off but i really look at these as an incredible
achievement what stands out for me is that we finally have a comprehensive view of all the
different aspects that we have to deal with to bring about positive change in gender relations
towards gender equality they've just connected me through all these but just slicing through them
but you can see how comprehensive they are
the mic stopped
today i'm just going to be focusing on on one of these circuits 5a it's one of the
implementing targets to undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources
as well as ownership and control over land and other forms of property and
financial services inheritance natural resources and accordance with national laws
it's a long one right i'm going to be highlighting ownership and control over land
uh because this is the one that i've worked on for almost 50 years and where we finally accomplished
something but it's also so critical to our broader agenda in terms of world development and uh goals
and that the framework is incredibly uh well-rounded in the sense that based of
the universal declaration of human rights and its applicability goes beyond less developed
countries to include the developed countries this is important because when we look at those targets
those need to be those of you that live in the us know very well all of those address
real concrete problems that we do have in the developed countries as well this doesn't mean
that the sdgs are perfect and quite a bit has been written in in since these were approved
uh particularly from a feminist perspective in terms of what's missing here i'm just going to
highlight a few of the points coming from feminist economists and the concern in terms of the first
point is that the sdg framework doesn't offer a coherent model of socioeconomic transformation
you know what you get is a very broad vision of sustainable development with 169 targets
all of them important but when it comes down to how these are going to be achieved they're based
on a very conventional view of growth and what you need is to increase gdp growth per capita
and somehow all of that's going to trickle down no innovation there at all what's missing is
macroeconomic policy and redistributive policies that might ensure that growth being inclusive
just as important has been the lack of financing or real commitment on the part of governments
to implement the agenda there's a long list of potential sources you know the right of the usual
foreign development assistance to foreign trades or remittances everything is sort of there but
there's no new sources of funding specifically for any of the uh hard work i shouldn't say
for draw i haven't studied this uh but there's not a great amount of new funding available for
any of the departments in particularly sdg5 the other concern is to do about the accountability
mechanisms a wonderful list of indicators i forget now the total number has been developed
around these 169 targets but the reporting on them is voluntary so there's no real um
certainty that the data that will be collected to be able to monitor these these targets over over
time you know this means that a critical role has to be played by civil society you and me
yet swapping governments uh both where we do our our field research as well as our own government
in terms of bringing accountability to to the process that the indicators and targets will form
a part of the country plans well for me what's been important in terms of land
is that i think we have a unique opportunity to really make a major progress on women's
ownership and control of the land i've already highlighted how it's the central part of target 5a
and interestingly although targets on a is so broad in terms of the reforms the only indicators
are about land so there's three specific indicators all focused on land to implement
5 5a you know basic indicators that you would imagine should be available you know the
proportion of uh producers or the proportion of the ag population they have ownership or secure
rights by sex the share of women among owners or righteous and also a focus on the legal framework
of the course of countries that guarantee women's equal rights to land well how did we get here
what did this reflect um i contend that the focus on land the fact that we're finally in fear
the land has given been given that recognition has been to this combination of theory and field work
that's taken place the theoretical development that's happened over
of the last 25 years really and the field work that goes back even
certainly one of the most important contributions to the theory was archer waltz a 1994 book a
field of one zone about south asia it's sort of fitting that this year is the 25th anniversary
of that book being being published in many ways it's a real tribute
to being in for work and all of this that were inspired by it
that land is finally the key indicator to adventure progress i i don't have time to go
through her quite comprehensive argument in terms of why land is important to women her arguments
go in terms of welfare efficiency equality and empowerment but let me hone in on the empowerment
argument because i'll be illustrating many of the aspects to to this argument in my talk today
basically land ownership is what they increase rural limits of all that position and hence
household bargaining power to translate that for you for those of you that haven't studied
this particular literature we could sort of nap it on to kabir's well-known piece on the process
of empowerment work for career the process of empowerment was this relationship between uh women
that have been denied access to resources gaining access to resources such as land employment
education how access to resources was related to women's agency which in turn would result in
new levels of achievement for women in terms of the life that they would like to live
put in the language of feminist economics access to resources such as land employment or education
are the elements that strengthens women's fallback position how well off they would
be if a process of household cooperation broke down and in a similar fast factor fashion the
strength of a woman's fallback position whether she could really survive outside the household
if a separation or divorce took place or if she was left widowed is related to their bargaining
power or their ability to participate in decisions regarding you know her and her family's
well-being to the extent that women have bargaining power in turn they should be
able to exert their preferences you know their view of the kind of life they'd like to lead
leading to better outcomes for women and their children in particular so it's this relationship
between land is an element strengthening women's fallback position how that relates to their
marketing power sometimes seeing in terms of data on decision making and better outcomes that i want
to develop in my talk today this is why data is so important because up until recently we haven't
been able to test many of these really important propositions because we simply don't have the data
we've been lobbying since the 70s to expand what's collected in the agricultural
censuses but still to this day most censuses only gather data on female land holders not landowners
but since 2010 we do have some advances such as the dhs surveys that now include a question on
land and home ownership the living standard measurement studies for africa that i'll be
drawing on later on and some of the specialized surveys from history and
the gender acid gap project that i was part of it critical to the advances that
we've made in terms of quantitative data or the surveys has been the kind of interdisciplinary
field work that's shaped these new questionnaires and surveys it's been field work that's defined
the research and issues and it's also taught us how to answer the questions
because as we know data is only in quantitative data it's only as good
as how you ask a culturally relevant way that you ask the questions that you're trying to
quantify okay let me pick up speed a bit and turn to what we can learn from the the agricultural
censuses and what data we do have uh today um first the sheriff were the landholders uh recall
that landholders are the equivalent of managers you know it's the question of who who's in charge
of them of the farm makes the major decisions and as you'll see in these slides we still don't
have the majority of countries for any world region totally represented here for africa
the median share of women managers is around 19 uh but what really calls attention is the broad range
in modeling less than five percent of the managers or women to gender equality in case benefit
if we go to asia we have 10 countries here the median is only around 12 percent
the range is pretty much narrower from 5 percent in bangladesh to 27 islands latin america has more
data for the censuses have been more forthcoming than publishing the collecting and publishing data
by sex we now have data from 16 countries and the media here is around 22
it's a little bit higher in latin america than than in africa but only as uh as a media
well you know this is good there's more and more countries that are at least asking about
who manages the farm but besides the problem that not all countries are carrying out excesses
there's some problems here first the census questionnaires always assume that only one
person in the household is the farm manager and if only one person can be named as the manager
what's the natural thing to do the household debt so you get this confluence of head shift
and management that doesn't really tell you much about the operations of any given farm
holding it wasn't until this latest round of agricultural censuses that val recommended that
joint holders should be taken into account that is for a number of reasons including the fact that um
in some cases farms are divided up into sub-parcels uh the case of africa for example
where you can have males of male carbon systems and female farming systems within one major uh
unit the separate spheres argument the recognition that farms often carry out multiple activities
and you can have a gender division of labor in terms of who's in charge of what
so if he had let's say women doing agriculture and then livestock and there's also home gardens and
egg processing and all sorts of other things going on and you're asking about
one manager you're sure to shortchange the managerial decision making going on among
others besides the fact that farming involves so many decisions that we would expect
more than one person's death to be involved the other great problem that they act censuses
is that the land tend your question only ask if a farm is owner operated it doesn't ask
who in the household owns the farm is it the respondent is it his or her spouse is both of
them together is a one in them with another family member there's an infinite number of combinations
an illustration of why it's so misleading to only ask about one person per farm as
the manager decision maker is shown here in terms of uganda a pilot study that fbo did recently for
this purpose usually using the traditional question uh of one person per household
you can see on your left the great majority of farm managers or the land holders are
turned out to be men but once you wrote down decision making over the key 14
agricultural and livestock decisions and asked who participated in that process you see on
your right a totally different distribution of who's involved yet the great majority 67
of the decisions were made jointly by several people usually husband and wife but
also including others and really just a minority of the decisions were made by men alone yet this
illustrates well why this is a problem right to only expect one person to be the decision maker
interestingly enough only one country that i know of in the world actually followed the fao
recommendation for the 2010 censuses and asked about joint holders and
that was colombia in their 2014 census and there in the way that they asked the question
uh they first asked in the plural in terms of how many people in this household are engaged
in agricultural livestock decision making and then they left space for up to four names
so here's a distribution of farms by the the sacks of the holders reported that way and you can see
that nationally only 12.5 percent of the farms reported joint management that included men and
men and women might not seem like a terrific amount but once you disaggregate that
doing a little bit of the trying to see how this behaves differently by ethnic in racial groups
you can see that for indigenous households joint uh management is much more important
as it is among you know afro-colombian households so what does this tell us well then in the
traditional way of asking that question who's the manager it's particularly indigenous women
and afro descendant women who we've known through field work are always involved in the agriculture
that are the most under represented and this matters for policy we've got to know who's
involved who's making the decisions to be able to say much of productivity or the particular kinds
of problems that are faced by by different kinds of farmers well it's because colombia included
joint holders then on that latin american slide that i showed you columbia was the leader for
latin america where women were 33 that's because i've taken into account that the joint voters
in that fight i'm going to just skip some because i can see i'm talking
don't want to run out of time what about land ownership well here
we're down to pretty limited uh numbers of surveys that have done the kind of a bit of
answer the question the way that it should be asked which is asking about land ownership at
the level of the parcel and asking who to whom in the household they belong the man the woman both
of them other combinations etc and these are the data from that lsms isa survey that really took
best practices into into account and what stands out for africa is how joint ownership right is
is so frequent um particularly uh we could see in uganda it's the dominant form of illusion uh
but also very important in nigeria not a tanzanian uh also interesting here in terms of a good survey
is how in malawi uh women's ownership of wants uh exceeds that by by minute right who would it
guess unless you've done a really good survey that got down to the parcel level to ask such questions
for asian latin america our data is even more limited because very few surveys have allowed for
joint ownership you can see here in bangladesh minimal even vietnam that has a policy
favoring the uh the joint land use certificates the
i want to show you the data or what the data looks like when you use the same framework the
same questionnaire in three different parts of the world and these are the results from the project
that i've been working on for the last 10 years or so which has been a comparative study of asset
ownership and wealth in ecuador ghana in karnataka um india and i'm not sure but we were probably the
pioneers really getting down to the nitty-gritty of asking about every single person in its form
of ownership here you can see the tremendous differences across countries in yellow is ecuador
in a country where the the dominant form is enjoying ownership right uh also looking when
you're looking at individual parcels between men and women more women's parcels than men's parcels
very different vision than what the census gives you in terms of agricultural holders
you know we're women who are only 22 percent of the holders what this does confirm is how
in karnataka india women are not very well off uh in this survey um you know in women's access
and ownership of assets across the board with much slower than men in uh the other countries
well where i want to go with this data is towards the relationship between women's land ownership
and the role in agricultural decision-making because a lot of the really interesting questions
is when you bring these two pieces of information together among the questions that we need to ask
to really get down to policy not to mention programs is figuring out if women landowners
manage the farms that they own this question itself we have to break down into two parts
are women landowners as likely as men to work their land directly rather than renting or share
propaganda and to women landowners if the plot is worked by the household are they participating
in agricultural decision making and how does this differ from from there related to that there's the
form of ownership individual land ownership versus joint land ownership make a difference in terms of
women's participation in management and related to that as well particularly for purposes of
doing quantitative research do husbands and wives have similar perceptions of women's participation
in decision making or are there biases so that it really matters who you ask to answer your survey
question let me illustrate just a few of these propositions
first a woman is likely to work their land directly here the data for ecuador to me was quite
surprising this showed that individual or sole female owners were much more likely than male soul
owners or joey holders to rent out or share crop their land and this was really disappointing to
me because i've been hearing for i don't know how many years from usually male extinction agents uh
the claim that well women need any money here at land but they're not interested in being farmers
you know the you know they're not to be taken seriously so when i saw this data i'm going oh
my god you know women are not as likely to to work their um their land but what this means we have to
investigate this one we do have to take seriously if women's preferences in a given context are
not to be agriculturalists to be engaged in other activities and are they less likely to
work or more are they less likely to work for land because of discrimination in access to technical
assistance credit all of those other factors that go into successful harming um we've looked at the
this one or the second part of the question uh in our gender asset camp project in terms of
if the household works the what do the women owners then participate in decision making
and we found that the degree of participation by women owners depends on their marital standards
form of ownership in this specific decision we did find that female heads or women that
did not have a partner were much more likely than married women or those in a consensual
union to make almost all the decisions under plots and among partnered women that sole loaners are
more likely than joint owners to be involved in decision making and make decisions alone
similarly joint owners are more likely to make decisions jointly with their partners
this proposition has now been tested for a much larger group of countries thanks to those elesmus
studies in in africa and what we're finding are quite different results there's a tendency
for women soul owners to always participate more than than join owners and there is some evidence
that joining over example in the christian jacobs in case study in uganda and south africa
that joined ownership quite happy more much more different than women just having traditional use
of park rights to land through their husband or another relative which is important um at
the same time in studies such as the zlatjeska and fao study that looked at gender differences
at both men and women making decisions alone or uh jointly um
or ownership in decision making uh you see a wide variety of outcomes so the answer for
now to that question is that much depends on on context there's certainly not enough data
to say let's forget about joint ownership or tightly because in many parts of the world
it's the main way that's the main policy in which women can access land and ownership such as peru
in terms of issue number three do men and women have similar perceptions of women's participation
decision making here again using the equidore data you can see the column on the right we constructed
index based over the four decisions and you know generally the great majority of men and women
both said the women owners participate in all the decisions relative to that to the land
but that little gap between the blue and the origin in the far right is statistically
significant and you can see why looking at the rest of the distribution your husbands
are likely to underestimate women's participation compared to their wives so careful in terms of you
know who you ask to be the respondent to your survey question because you're not going to get
the same response okay i want to move quickly to the relationship between women's land ownership
and and outcomes because we finally have a growing body of work that starts to test
these these relationships uh one set of studies looks specifically in household decision making
which is that relationship between access to resources and agency and even in countries such
as nepal and karnataka where women are fairly low sure very low share of the managers or landowners
we see that women's land ownership does make a difference and only blank prepared for not only
does increase their participation in number of different kinds of decisions this question has
also been looked at in terms of the impact or the relationship with household expenditures
this is a way of looking at outcomes where you say if women have earth or owners of land
then they're going to be involved in decision making so their preferences are going to be
felt in terms of how household income is budgeted right and what people have taken is
confirmation of women's bargaining power is when household expenditures on
food increase both purchased in hong kong such as in this case city of ghana all of one in vietnam
like the vietnam particular that where women have led use certificates the expenditures of food
increase but alcohol and tobacco and spencer's fall right there we could see a pretty clear shift
in infrared in the study in ethiopia you also get women are included on joint land certificates the
household spends more in women's and girls clothing compared to men very interesting
and related there's a number of studies in terms of the impact that women's in
children's well-being whether women's health or the health and schooling of their
of your children i'll rush through these because i'm going to get to
intimate partner violence in many ways there's no better indicator of women's disempowerment
right than the incidents of intimate partner violence across the world and amber peterman
just finished the the largest study to date for 29 countries looking at the indicator of women's
land ownership or home ownership its relationship with the incidence of of intimate partner violence
unfortunately in the 29 countries there's only five where land ownership by women was protective
of intimate partner violence in one two three four countries it was actually
positively associated in other words there was a backlash effect someone was land ownership
was associated with more violence but perhaps the most bewildering was in 19 countries there was no
significant effect at all well the the data the studies that have been done in land ownership
um prior to that were also mixed uh homeownership there's some stronger evidence for a number of
countries but there's still a number of questions on um on how we're doing this i can't i don't
have time to go into all the measurement issues and and methods these studies really
aren't comparable with different case studies that's why we were so excited by this large uh
29th country setting because they at least have the same methods
but it seems here the context is really important how common it is for women tell to own land it
might need for there to be a critical mass of women land owners you know where before any
kind of bargaining power really results from uh from land uh ownership another proposition
that we've developed in our own work in the gender answer project is that it may be that
land ownership isn't really a binary question it isn't just whether you own or you don't own land
but it's your asset ownership compared to your spouse that's a much better indicator of
potential marketing power and it might not be land that's the critical resource it might be livestock
it might be home ownership that might differ by context so that's why in many studies
we've done or in our study we've got to measuring all assets so we could talk about women's share
of wealth just to show you one more data slide and then i'll move to conclusions quickly uh
in ecuador we got a perfect relationship where women's share of wealth right was
inversely associated with the incidence of ipv and here you can see the sweet spot was between
40 to 60 percent in other words gender equality gave you the best outcome of all that you
put too many assets in the hands of women and you get the backlash of that so
okay in conclusion i hope i've convinced you that the importance of collecting individual level
gender disaggregated data on women's ownership of land uh i've shown you just some of the evidence
there's a lot more evidence from once we go beyond land to look at other bargaining power
measures to show its relationship to household bargaining power and outcomes that are beneficial
for women and children that result from the men you have focused on land because
of the crucial importance of land because i think we've got this unique opportunity
to make progress on what's been a major obstacle to gender research the lack of it of adequate data
to end just on two indicators of the progress the fao is the lead institution for the agricultural
related sdgs and their gender land rights database is the main one that's collecting
now data not just from the census on land holders but also the survey results on women's ownership
and they're also maintaining the database on legal frameworks so i urge you to get things like that
but finally the probably the most important sort of change in policy is that for the 2020 round of
censuses which starts in 2020 fdo is once again but now really going after making a much larger
push so that the landholder includes joint management plus they're finally
recommending a new module module 10 on the intra-household distribution of decisions and
ownership of the whole thing and this is what will finally generate the kind of data that we need to
be able to answer or research in a comparative fashion across regions or across countries many
of these interesting propositions both management and ownership of land this is going to require a
major longering effort and i hope i've convinced all of you to join me in this endeavor many things
all right so thank you and now we have 15 minutes the question answer discussion so
we have our two mics would you like to raise your hand or if you're treating uh
our mind volunteers are ready
i want to encourage everyone to keep their questions short and
recognize that we have a lot of people that are asking so
um
is
so the question was about inheritance and
land rights um how women in many areas don't have proper access in the case
is
um
all very good questions that could easily spend the afternoon
uh discussing um first on the us id data the feed the future program has put a lot
of resources into doing baseline surveys in order to be able to analyze the impact and lynn
is afraid to develop the gender empowerment and agriculture um indicators to be able to
measure the impact of what we're doing we've got two and the other two keynoters in this conference
are the experts on these data sets so you know crystal wants to say something now about it
um
address tomorrow and we'll discuss this as well as dr
agnes who is now actually in charlotte already in 204 for tomorrow morning
i didn't bring right i didn't highlight those surveys because they're
usually regional surveys that means uh necessarily national and that's what i was trying to
provide uh let me nearly deal with the
versus qualitative it's real difficult to compare countries with qualitatively it's
hard enough for quantitative data right as we're seeing saw such different efforts you know how
do you explain it well to me there's no way to separate qualitative and quantitative research
they have that to go together because as i've mentioned in my talk it's qualitative research
that really leads to the questions and how to pose the questions besides we should intervene
so plays a fundamental world here but it's the quantitative data and when you're looking at the
spread of data i don't know how many of you get a thrill out of like having 103 that gender equality
because how are we going to figure that out well that's usually qualitative research
so here's the quantitative research that can really stimulate uh because what we need to know
you know provide the motivation to then go back out into that
but so so you need book that's clear uh the last question was in terms of inheritance
uh i didn't have a chance to speak much about the third indicator on land is the policy framework
in eliminating all forms of discrimination against women right and access to that inheritance is
really really critical um there's a progress it has been made the world bank has documented this
really well in terms of the um you know how many countries in instituted reform you know
we know that reform of inheritance legislation of civil codes etc is a necessary but not sufficient
condition those of you from indiana are probably familiar with you know how the indian codes now
i do provide for gender equality and inheritance of land but things change really slowly right
when they do change they make a difference you've got good studies showing that
yes you know that in the next generation this year women and inheritance has increased
you know but maybe from two percent to five percent maybe talking about societies when the
male preference has been so strong in terms of
research also shows that even though small differences in the fact that women do legally
inherit does that it is associated with women's bargaining problems you know that
in regions that have implemented that kind of legislation girls are more likely to go to school
it's associated with girls nearing at a later age which is also very important
but yeah we've got to keep our eye on adherence because globally inheritance is still the
primary way that women acquire women you know overall as a country's level of development
increases the market becomes more important
but for women even in countries such as ecuador inheritance is still the main way to take it
we have two questions in twitter the first one is
what is root cause of fewer women land owners working online
and the second question is do you think the higher prevalence
of joint land ownership in ecuador has anything to do with their full
sovereignty law which holds gender equality as a core policy tenant
do you think the higher prevalence of joint land ownership in ecuador has anything to do
with their good sovereignty law which holds gender equality as a core policy candidate
so i wanted to know if you have any insights regarding why women that have actually done
ownership a student of power concerning the household issues for example reparations of
the house or in the part of the let's say they have a reproductive party but they still have
the decision over for example which crops to put or changes in the house and struck like the house
construction itself it seems like i have i am familiar with some places in ecuador
in which women have land ownership but still they are bargaining power regarding which
drugs to pull or for example things regarding the house construction they still they don't
have a voice class so i don't know if you have any sense about that
hello my name is mary rodriguez from the ohio state university and i am curious to know if
in your analysis you looked at the size of the land parcel ownership and if the size of the
parcel actually influenced their decision-making abilities and if that in fact had anything to do
as well with the intimate partner violence that you also looked at
hi i am
but cultural facility you mentioned multiple times in your program including the community
boys is very important to getting good data but also ownership of the project um but it seems
like contrary to what i've encountered at least in my work with the scale-up idea
like making programs that can be universally applicable to multiple countries and they're
trying to save funds and invest in those programs these helpful nuances that ability to give that
cultural presidency is lost so i'm just wondering how you interact with that in your work as well
it's good to see the latin americanist latinos riled
you know quantitative analysis always looking at national means
right and we didn't have a large enough sample to really do the detailed
kind of work where you're looking at rural urban highlands coasts
ethnicity breaks you know all the intersectionality that we would need
right for a real analysis of what's going on unfortunately you need lots and lots of money to
do a really huge uh survey that's representative down to that level of analysis where we really
want to get to talk about intersectionality and in a quantitative way so so all i can really say
are these general friends uh first why are women not interested in working the romantic um what
my intuitive response to that from from field work is that in many regions of ecuador
um you've had a real differentiation of the pesticide you know where pesticides
prices uh there is this association that women are not going to get their hands dirty
but they can direct other workers right so it's not like they might be particularly
but women that have more opportunities often prefer to get involved in non-agricultural
activities and i didn't get a chance to show you some of our regression results
but one of our quantitative results is that women landowners really consider working on
farm as a trade-off with being involved in agricultural decisions so many times they prefer
for their husband to manage the land so that they can engage in trading as a full-time
population or they might engage as homemakers because there's more procedure to attach
to being a homemaker in certain regions this of course varies across the whole country but
one of the things that hasn't been researched that i'm hoping someone will
do are all the forms of discrimination that really discourage women from managing reforms and that's
what we don't have a good study of indian case to really explain those results falling
on whether joint ownership of land is related to the food sovereignty law unfortunately the food
sovereignty law did exilt in terms of women's land rights uh it's a beautiful law in terms of
aspirations but in practice it had a
convenient very good projector component to talk very vaguely about recognizing women's land rights
i think jointness goes back to a book written by anthropologist sarah hamilton way back in
the early 80s and she entitled her book the dual headed household right it's a wonderful wonderful
economic and ecological study of uh one of the indigenous valleys in
ecuador and she gives us a really good explanation in terms of how in that particular region
uh jointness is the basis of everything you know men and women having complementary roles
uh sometimes separate worlds with complementary good decision-making always being joined and most
important bilateral inheritance being really key to joint decisions so that both daughters
and sons brought land into the marriage and that was the basis of gender equality within marriage
now further studies in the case of background show that each valley has a different pre-columbian
plants you know that intersected historically with differences in scandal systems so you do
have all this variation that goes into think this is also related to the approach decisions
are women involved and this is again where qualitative work is really really important
in figuring out in that particular context which are the key decisions that can tell us
something about empowerment and we know that that's going to vary it's hard to uh
right on land size um yeah i think it's much more important to look probably
relative land size than it is on whether women are owners or for non-owners and that's why
the relative point here is really critical because from
the work and into the partner violence and we know the partner status differentials
are real important whether it's age levels of education whether wonderfuls are employed so i
think that that's really the way that future research has to go to get the better answers
thank you i didn't answer all parts of
this
you