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Changing gender roles in agriculture? Evidence from 20 years of data in Ghana

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  • Lambrecht, I.
  • Schuster, M.

Abstract

Many stylized facts about women in agriculture have been repeated for decades. Did nothing really change? Is some of this conventional wisdom simply maintained over time, or has it always been inaccurate? We use four rounds of cross-sectional data from Ghana to assess some of the facts and to evaluate whether gender patterns have changed over time. We focus on five main themes: land, cropping patterns, market participation, agricultural inputs, and employment. We add to the literature by showing new facts and evidence for more than 20 years. Results show that stylized facts do not always hold, and that some of these facts change over time. We find significant variation in the extent of (changes in) gender discrepancies across themes, different agroecological zones, ethnicities, household types and women s role in the household. Acknowledgement : We thank the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Funding for their support for this study under the Ghana Strategic Support Program. We are appreciative to the VLIR-UOS scholarship program to provide a research visit grant to Laura Pelleriaux, and we are especially thankful to Miet Maertens from the Division of Bioeconomics of KU Leuven, Belgium, for facilitating the early stages of the research. This work is undertaken as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

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  • Lambrecht, I. & Schuster, M., 2018. "Changing gender roles in agriculture? Evidence from 20 years of data in Ghana," 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia 276989, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:iaae18:276989
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.276989
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