Women’s work in small-scale fisheries: a framework for accounting its value

Abstract

Women play an important role in small-scale fisheries around the world. Their work along the entire fish value chain contributes to the productivity of the sector and enhances household income. But this work remains unrecognized and undervalued, and women continue to be excluded from decision-making in fisheries management and policy development. This study aims to construct a theoretical framework for analyzing how women’s fish processing and trade activities create value and enhance competitive advantage along the fish value chain. It asks how the value of fish is generated by women’s labor in processing and trade and how we might construct a theory of value that better accounts women’s contributions to fish economies. The framework combines the Resource-Knowledge-Based-View, which considers situated knowledge as a source for capability creation, and Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis, which describes and assesses how the activities performed by women create value within and across value chain nodes. Applying this framework to three fish economies in Mexico and India, findings emphasize that a) valuable assets emerge from women’s work in small-scale fisheries; and b) to make gender visible, it is necessary to identify how and where value and profit are created by women in each node of the fish value chain. Recognizing the value of women’s work is a key element to empower them and to make visible an invisible workforce.