The first myth is that the feminization of agriculture is the predominant trend in global agriculture, closely associated with male labor outmigration, women playing greater roles in smallholder agriculture, and increased participation of women in commercial agriculture, both on the farm and in processing facilities.
In many places, men are moving out of smallholder agriculture at a faster rate than women. Men frequently migrate to cities, both domestic and international. When they leave, the women who remain on the farm often become more visible, both as farmers and as farm managers. For example, in Nepal, there is widespread outmigration of men from rural areas, with women frequently remaining in the rural areas. These women increasingly identify themselves as primary farmers, whereas they had previously considered themselves contributing family members (Slavchevska et al., 2020). Similar patterns are found in China (Mu and van de Walle, 2011), India (Pattnaik et al., 2018), Egypt (Binzel and Assaad, 2011) and elsewhere.
In addition, women are taking advantage of new forms of wage labor in agriculture. Large-scale commercial farming, particularly that aimed at export markets, has created new employment opportunities. Women are increasingly working in this sector (Bigler et al., 2017; Deere, 2005; Sachs, 2019), although they still tend to predominate in seasonal, rather than full-time jobs (Bernardini, 2019; Deere, 2005; Gopal et al., 2020).
A third trend is that in some places such as Latin America (Deere, 2005), Morocco (Najjar et al., 2018), and Tajikistan (Mukhamedova and Wegerich, 2014), women are migrating within rural areas to engage in agricultural labor, particularly harvesting. There is little data that tells the extent to which this is a new trend and quantitatively different from the past, or whether it is simply becoming more recognized.