Gender equity

Gender equity is a special type of equity that requires further attention due to the complexities of analyzing intra-household allocation, exchange, and procedures.

Drawing from the gender empowerment literature, we developed a conceptual framework for gender equity in agriculture. Following Hemminger et al. (2014), we use the empowerment framework from Kabeer (1999) to categorize gender equity metrics as follows:

• Resources – Metrics that measure differential access to resources for agriculture.
• Agency – Metrics that measure differential levels of control over resources.
• Achievements – Metrics that measure gendered differences in realizing various benefits from agriculture.

Most of the gender equity metrics require obtaining quantitative information from men and women and then calculating the gender gap. For easy interpretation, we follow the suggestion by Rao et al. (2016) to compute the gender gap as the ratio of the female value to the male value expressed as a percentage, which we will refer to as gender parity.

Gender parity (%) = female value / male value * 100

Ideally, this calculation would be carried out using data from male and female adults in a given household. However, interviewing multiple respondents per household is time-consuming for data collection, entry, and analysis. In some situations, it may be possible for one respondent to provide information about who in the household owns and controls various resources. While this information is collected at the individual or household level, it will often be useful to analyze it at the community level.  In many cases, it may be useful to disaggregate the average gender indicators for various categories of women (household heads or part of a dual-headed household, junior or senior women in the household, etc.).