Women's status and global food security: An overview

Abstract

AbstractScholars are increasingly examining how gender interacts with food security, with specific attention given to women. This is not surprising, given that women make up 43% of the global agricultural labor force and are responsible for producing almost half of the global agricultural food supply. Since women tend to be disproportionately responsible for taking care of household activities, including the production, purchase, preparation, and allocation of food‐based resources—particularly in the developing world—there is a scholarly consensus that an improvement in women's status has a positive impact on nutritional outcomes. Current scholarship on gender and food security is thus broadly divided into relationships between food security and women's economic freedoms, legal opportunities, and both formal and informal education via improved knowledge of agricultural procedures. In this review, I draw attention to the role that sociologists can play in engaging these topics, and I specifically highlight the need to conduct more cross‐national and longitudinal analyses of women's status and food security. Finally, I point towards recent studies that assess the impacts of Information and Communication Technologies on food security, and suggest the need to explicate the role of gender within such processes.