Women's Employment Issues: Discussion

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The results of the papers in this symposium have policy implications for the design of research and extension programs aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and incomes on farms which employ women, are comanaged by women, or are managed solely by women. Let us first examine the results of Jones' paper, which show that not all households in the third world can be treated as homogenous, unified decision-making units whose internal relationships can be taken as given either in research or extension projects. Indeed, the behavioral assumption that the household is a husband-wife team maximizing a jointly held utility function to attain shared goals obscures and ignores both the conflicts and the complex complementarities that occur within and divide the household, at least in the short run (Guyer, Haugerud). Instead, farming households in many societies of the third world (and certain subcultures of the U.S.) should be characterized as farm firms with overlapping but semiautonomous production and consumption units within the firm. The units are semiautonomous because they are managed by the several wives or married sons who are associated with the household via labor-, food-, and/or incomepooling arrangements. Each wife and married son is responsible for cultivation of a field and has the right to what the field produces. The units are overlapping because the wives and married sons also provide labor to cooperatively worked fields managed by the household head (McMillan). The extent to which household labor is allocated to the collective fields instead of the private fields, and the choice of food versus cash crops grown on each type of field has usually been determined by traditional rules and rights, e.g., the Massa husband's right to any of his wives' cash income not needed for food. With the introduction of an exogenous change, however, in the form of a rural development project introducing a new or recently irrigated cash crop, or a new land resettlement scheme (McMillan), or he sedentarization of a previously nomadic population, these traditional rules or rights are suddenly questionl' 1 and subject to negotiation. Conflicts often develop between household members determined to take advantage of the ne w, enlarged set of economic resources, be they the expanded surplus value from a new cash crop, access to new lands of