Are Women Taking over the Farm in China?

Abstract

Development practitioners in the West have proclaimed that a ``feminization of agriculture'' is occurring in the developing world. In this paper, I use household survey data collected in rural China to empirically test whether or not women have been doing an increasing amount of farmwork. I find exactly the opposite-- if anything, the proportion of farmwork being done by women is declining over the late 1990s. Furthermore, I analyze the demographic composition of the farm labor force and find that the future feminization of agriculture is unlikely.Women, agriculture, China, farm labor