Women in agriculture span the career spectrum from hands-on farm owners and managers to the unpaid extra pair of hands that runs to get parts or takes a turn checking the cows at calving time.
Women fill all those roles and more, and almost without exception, they juggle that work with all the other balls of home and family.
Farm women are raising kids, managing the household and caring for elderly parents in addition to everything else they do on and off the farm.
Read Also
You don’t have to be a people person to be a good leader
If you read Country Guide you are most likely a farm manager or owner which means that perhaps you’re often…
“Women are doing the invisible tasks in addition to the work that they ‘should be doing’ or are being paid for,” says Dr. Sonia K. Kang, associate professor of organizational behaviour and HR management at the University of Toronto. “There is so much unpaid labour that goes completely ignored.”
Which is not to say that men don’t juggle lots of balls themselves, but rarely do they have the same expectations as women, specifically when it comes to responsibilities related to the household and child care.
Given the uniqueness of the family farm, where home is also the business, and where there are inter-generational and family dynamics at play, the stereotypes and expectations can become amplified. That can lead women to feel overwhelmed, inadequate and unable to keep up, creating a vicious cycle of obligation, guilt, resentment, stress and anxiety that ultimately affects the whole family, and in many cases the farm itself.
“It’s very easy for people to fall into stereotypical domestic roles, which already happen in workplaces. For example, women will be the ones who clean the communal kitchen or make sure the coffee is refilled. Those kind of maintenance tasks tend to fall to women,” says Kang. “So, in a scenario where the workplace is your home and your colleagues are family members, it can exacerbate the thinking that women, especially, are expected to do that even more.”
What is women’s work?
Most people, though, assume these roles and expectations because of things like habit or tradition. They perpetuate stereotypes without consciously realizing they are doing so, and ultimately it causes tension and stress for men as well as women.
Kang and Dr. Joyce He, assistant professor at UCLA, have done some collaborative research that explores how men react to masculine language and male-dominated work environments.
There are new masculine ideals that men want for themselves, but on the farm they can feel it’s difficult to pursue them, Kang says. “There’s a lot of tension there, where men feel this pressure to be super-masculine and get things done … to be the person who’s running that farm and responsible for everyone else.”
What farms need to do to help overcome these issues is to assign roles based on skills and interests, not on gender, Kang suggests.
“It’s about being aware that biases might be filtering the path that people are taking, and (it’s about) making men aware that they’re trapped in this masculine world as well,” Kang says, and she sees many parallels between farming and other sectors based on foundations like asset ownership, male-hierarchies and roles that entrench gender bias.
“Agriculture is tied to very traditional masculine attributes,” Kang says. “Having dominance over land is a male stereotypical thing, and interacting with markets, financial management and all of these different things already have the foundation as being a man’s world.”
Although it’s a broader problem, these gender issues are intensified on farms because, like many family businesses, there is a high level of reliance on the labour of everybody in the family.
“It runs into the general trouble in our society where we don’t count women’s household labour,” says Dr. Mara Fridell, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba. “The pandemic really showed the ways in which we overcount some very masculine work and undercount a lot of feminized work.”
Don’t turn women into men
When trying to advance in roles typically dominated by men, women often — and understandably — approach the barriers by feeling they have to prove they can do everything the men are doing. But the trouble is, if they do everything the men do, they’re actually doing more.
“Instead of trying to get women to turn into men, we need to really understand and see the value of the work that women are doing,” Kang says. And, she stresses, “If we put value on the tasks that women are doing then they are no longer invisible, those tasks rise to the surface, and that visibility has the potential of making sure that tasks are split more equitably.”
So although the phrase “fair isn’t necessarily equal” often gets applied to the farm transition process, it’s equally applicable to day-to-day operations. It takes account of the family situation of the people involved, and of the distribution of household and child-rearing responsibilities within those family structures.
Equity requires fairness and impartiality, but it’s also impossible if it doesn’t speak to value. Of course, not every job in society is compensated in the same way. Some roles require more education, skills or experience than others, which is reflected in the salary level. It’s a challenge on the farm, though, because there are so many different tasks and it’s so hard to compare them.
It takes specialized knowledge to raise crops and livestock, to operate farm machinery and to do the marketing and manage the financials. Most of these jobs are compensated monetarily. But then there are also the less visible tasks that must be done if the farm is going to function, and many of them fall to women, such as making sure everyone is nourished every day, taking the kids to school or daycare, or being a full-time caregiver for pre-school children or elderly relatives.
How do we set it right?
So, how do you value the unpaid labour that women and other family members contribute to the farm and the household? Can it even be done?
It starts with identifying those tasks by making a list of them. “Be explicit about who is doing what,” Kang says. “Home-related tasks are much more likely to fall to women, without any recognition. The list allows you to not only identify things but to place value on them.”
Then look harder at those jobs. Although it’s tempting to assign roles according to stereotypes because it’s easier, doing that will hamper everyone’s ability to find the roles that they are best suited for and that will provide a better return for the farm business and the harmony of the household.
“It might be the case that men enjoy the tasks that women have been doing,” Kang says. “Because it’s not been seen as something that they should be doing, they have never tried them.”
‘Drop the ball’
Of course, women are often their own worst enemies, reluctant to seek change because they have been so deeply conditioned to believe that everything in the home is their responsibility.
American author and speaker, Tiffany Dufu agrees, and she has even coined a phrase for it: Home Control Disease.
“Most modern women scoff at the idea that a woman’s place is in the home,” Dufu says in her book, Drop the Ball: achieving More by Doing Less. “Yet, many women still focus obsessively on everything about it — how it’s organized, how it’s managed, and how the cooking, cleaning, and caretaking get done, down to the smallest detail … When it comes to our homes, many women feel a compulsive need to control, to make sure everything is managed in a particular way — our way.”
Dufu says women need to learn to “drop the ball,” focusing on what’s important and not feeling that they have to do it all if they want to achieve their true life’s purpose and be happy at work, at home and at play.
Dufu has had a successful, high-profile career in the non-profit sector and is an expert on women’s leadership, but she learned one of her most important lessons simply by observing other women that she admired.
“It occurred to me that women who are successful managers in the workplace abandon best professional practices at home,” Dufu says.
So, she went home and created an Excel spreadsheet. In the first column she made an exhaustive list of all the tasks she could think of that were required to manage the home she shared with her husband, Kojo, and her infant son, Kofi. In the three columns beside that list, she put the headings Kojo, Tiffany and No-one.
Next she populated the cells in her column with X’s against the tasks she currently performed, but when she got halfway through the list, she realized that “presenting my husband with a list of household duties that made it obvious how much more I did was not a winning strategy.”
So, she left the three columns completely blank and sat down instead with Kojo so they could begin to assign these tasks as a team. Before they began, she was surprised that Kojo wanted to add a bunch of items she hadn’t thought of (and some she hadn’t realised he was even doing or thought of as tasks essential to the household). As an example, he wrote down technology manager: “When have you ever programmed your phone or laptop”, and botanist: “The last time you watered a plant was in 1996 before we were even married. It was a cactus and it died.”
This is how the couple populated their list together, naming it their Management Excel List (MEL, for short). It was the dawn of a new era in their lives. MEL would prove to be the most useful tool the couple had for negotiating and tracking household responsibilities, but the most revealing part of the MEL exercise was deciding which tasks should go in the ‘No-one’ column.
“This column represented our acknowledgement that there was more to running a household than both of us could ever accomplish,” Dufu says. “We would stop making assumptions about what the other person was doing — or should be doing – and we would not blame each other for what didn’t get done.”
To make it work, though, women have to take a hard look at their goals. “We worry that if things go wrong at home, it will mean we’ve failed as women, because society tells us that to be a successful woman, we need camera-ready kids and a spotless kitchen,” Dufu says. “At the same time, we’re not supposed to openly admit that we feel our success as women is connected to our success at home. That would make us weak, or at least old-fashioned.”
The urge to micromanage
Jennifer Christie has never suffered from HCD.
“I lived on my own for so long, and I was so focused on my career that the other stuff wasn’t as important to me,” says Christie. “Things like what my house looked like when people came over was always of secondary importance to me. I never felt like my worth or my value was being judged on that. I was pursuing my career and pursuing the things that I felt were my strengths and was moving into my purpose.”
As founder of the Ag Women’s Network (AWN), Christie knows many women who do struggle with HDC. Any time AWN has held events, the topic of balancing career, family and home is always front and centre. “We really struggled because whenever we have someone speak about it, they always say the same thing,” Christie says. “There is no balance, you have to figure it out, but how?”
Christie says although she does believe that women and men of her generation are more likely to share responsibilities of the home and child care, women do have more of a tendency to micromanage the details of those tasks.
“Men are often not given the opportunity to do these things, and when they do, if it’s not perfect or the way we do it then it’s not good enough,” Christie says. “I feel that way in the workplace too when I try and delegate something.”
Christie admits that she is trying to learn how to delegate with a focus on the outcome rather than the way she thinks things should be done, a lesson that many women need to learn if they want to successfully “drop the ball” as Dufu advocates.
“A lot of it is about attitudes, being open to change, and not having a blind side that we don’t have to do it the way we always did it,” Christie says. “When I talk to people about this, a lot of people will try and guilt-shame women that they are still responsible for the home … we have to let people figure out what works best for them and their situation, and it may not be what has worked for others.”
That’s especially challenging in a family farm situation where there may be more than one generation involved.
“That’s where we get into a lot of tension in succession talks,” Christie says. “We get to a point where we keep doing the same things and we don’t really stop and say, is this actually serving the purpose that we had initially set out to serve or are we just stuck in the motions? In our relationships, how many of us have actually had a conversation about who is going to do what, what our purposes are and what we want? We aren’t intentional about those things.”
Dufu also suggests that one of the reasons women can be so controlling when it comes to the household is because it’s the only place that women are recognized as the authority, and Christie agrees. But networking may help.
The value of networking for women
Networking can be more important for women in agriculture than men because it gives them a chance to share their ideas and experiences, as well as to learn from each other and build a like-minded community of women not just in agriculture, but including other sectors too.
Kang sees this as well. “Now we have the opportunity to connect to people through social media … you can share your experiences but you can also share strategies and learn from each other,” Kang says. “Networking is even more important for women because they’re not in the old boys club network, they’re not going to be in the situations where they’re going to be introduced to other people.”
Life on the farm raises the stakes, though.
“It’s more important for rural women to organize than anyone, because they really are overwhelmed,” says Fridell. “Being able to work with other people effectively and efficiently, and to prioritize getting things done collectively — these are the sorts of problems that don’t get well managed by yourself in isolation. I think it’s crucial that rural women are networking and organizing.”
So if farm women are going to thrive, a lot is going to have to change, Fridell says. In particular, she says it’s important for the farm community to recognize that organizing groups that are going to be effective advocates and resources for women in agriculture takes real skill and commitment, and it needs to be driven.
“You can’t just have a Facebook group and expect something to happen, especially when it’s being run by overwhelmed people,” Fridell says. “There are lots of skills that have been lost around how do you organize; just even how do you bring people together to prioritize working together.”
But agriculture needs to recognize there is a cost to not succeeding too, both across the industry and on individual farms. Success, says Fridell, will take “waking up the world to the unsustainability of the workload that these women are enduring.”
Talk it out
Farms in India are developing a better path for farm women to join the workforce. It could work in Canada too
A recent Canadian study in rural India has uncovered interesting insights into the participation of farm women in the work economy. The study suggests that a lot of our research into work-life balance hasn’t really understood the intricate household dynamics that are needed for women to pursue careers or paid work outside of the home.
Women’s participation in the workforce has stagnated in both the developed and developing world despite a plethora of programs aimed at supporting its growth.
In the United States, the rate of working-age women in the workforce is 57 per cent, a number that has barely changed in 30 years, while in India and China the number of women in the labour force has been dropping steadily.
A new study — Worklife Balance as a Household Negotiation: A new Perspective from Rural India by Dr. Rachael Goodman of Mercer University and Dr. Sarah Kaplan of the University of Toronto — is based on field research with Indian women employed outside the home in the rural northern state of Uttarakhand. The researchers found that work-life balance was possible for these women, but could only be achieved through negotiations within families to shift household labour burdens, not by individual women reallocating their time.
Most of the women in the study live on farms, and despite barriers that include a high burden of household labour, lack of labour-saving appliances, and gendered norms about women’s presence in public spaces, a number of women held off-farm jobs — but only when someone else took over some of their household responsibilities.
Those people were family members, more likely women, although men also contributed in certain cases. Almost always the motivation for women working off the farm was economic, although increasingly younger women take advantage of the period in their lives before they gain family responsibilities to get both a post-secondary education and a career.
It’s not unique to rural India, although the circumstances may differ. Women on Canadian farms understand the pressures and stresses of trying to balance multiple roles, which is why there is a lot to be learned from this study.
In India, families redistributed household work in different ways depending on the woman worker’s stage in life and the family’s circumstances. What was common across all the families, though, was that the redistribution was negotiated among all the adults involved.
“Before a woman would go out to work (off the farm), there had to be a conversation because she did so much at home that her leaving would have a big impact, and so it was something that the whole family had to be a part of,” says Goodman, who did the actual field work in India, and who believes Canadian farm families need to have the same conversations.
“Women, especially those with families, can’t just pick up and do it, and add yet another job to their workload. They need to have those discussions when they are overburdened about how they can share responsibilities and get help,” Goodman says. “It’s important to have those conversations openly because if you are not having them people will just assume that you are fine.”
In countries like Canada and the U.S., part of the solution might mean relying on services like formal daycare, ordering a meal in or sending clothes out to be washed, although even these services aren’t always any more available to Canadian farm families in rural areas than they are to Indian ones.
It can also mean other options need to be explored, like flexible work arrangements that take into consideration the rhythms of the farming year, so employers need to be part of the conversation too.
“One of the most overlooked things in the western world is how much people rely on families,” Goodman says. “We should acknowledge that work and value it.”
The discussion is only beginning, and it needs to continue, she believes. “A lot of farm families in Canada have more in common with farm families in India than they may have in common with someone who lives in a city in Canada.”
