The second myth is that women are “left behind” in the rural village as passive victims of rural change while men choose to leave the village and earn higher income elsewhere. Women are seen as being “stuck” managing unproductive farms without adequate resources.
As men abandon the farm, women may experience increased drudgery rather than empowerment as they become responsible for marginal farms (Pattnaik et al., 2018). Women’s additional responsibilities on family farms limit their opportunities to take paid jobs (Bacud et al., 2019), reinforcing gender norms that men earn incomes and women engage in unpaid labor of care and farming (Wu and Ye, 2016). Women “left behind” not only face labor and time burdens, but also greater psychological burdens than women whose husbands stay in the village (Graham et al., 2015). When married women migrate with their husbands, elderly grandmothers may be “left behind” caring for the farm and grandchildren (Tamale, 2018).
Precarious transnational labor migration may involve risk of exploitation and few remittances sent back to rural communities. If remittances are insufficient for investment in agriculture, women remaining on the farm may compensate for the shortage of men’s labor with their own labor (Paris et al., 2005). This problem is particularly acute in areas where there are few other opportunities in the rural areas. Rural areas may become dependent on remittances and are particularly vulnerable when these remittances stop (Torres and Carte, 2016).
It may be disempowering for women when their husband migrates out. When a wife co-resides with other male relatives and senior women (e.g., mother-in-law), patriarchal family relations may continue (de Haan, 2006; Desai and Banerji, 2008; Doss et al., 2022; Hoodfar, 1996). The wife may no longer benefit from the mediating influence of her husband. In this case, the physical absence of her husband does not change patriarchal structures and women’s position in farming may remain the same or become worse.