Does the Feminisation of Agricultural Labour Empower Women? Insights from Female Labour Contractors and Workers in Northwest Syria

Abstract

With major socio-economic changes in the Middle East and North Africa spurring men's exit from agriculture, women now represent over 60 per cent of the agricultural workforce in several countries. Drawing on original field research, this paper analyses the emergence of female agricultural labour contractors and female wage labour groups in north-west Syria and compares the outcomes for the contractors' and labourers' empowerment with regard to four dimensions of power or agency: power within, power to, power over and power with. An evolving but delicate balance between continuity and transformation has permitted modest gains in women's empowerment without challenging intrahousehold gender power relations.

“Women’s empowerment through seed improvement and seed governance: Evidence from participatory barley breeding in pre-war Syria”

“…Numerous studies have focused on the methodology to assess empowerment. Alkire et al (2013) have developed a standard methodology to assess the status of women's empowerment and allow cross-country comparison. Tsikata and Darkwah (2014) discuss to what extent empowerment is an individual path contextual in space and time that can only entail a comparison with respect to the same person at different times in their lives, rather than among different people on the basis of universal indicators.…”

“…In Syria women's share of farming work was increasing at the time of this study as men left farming in search of higher incomes. Yet, the feminization of agricultural labour entailed modest gains in women's empowerment without a transformation of power structures (Abdelali-Martini and De Pryck, 2014). The war is likely to have increased the feminization of agricultural labour, a trend present in various war contexts, given that men joined the war or migrated abroad to look for work (De Schutter, 2013).…”

‘In Exile, the Woman Became Everything’

“…As one woman from Deraa confirmed, 'before the war, [our] men worked with cars'that is, as cross-border taxi and lorry drivers. In the temporary absence of men, older women in rural areas often ran family-held shops, and worked as nurses and teachers (Rugh, 1996;Rabo, 2008), while unmarried girls were hired out to local farmers as low-skilled day labourers (Chatty, 2013;Abdelali-Martini and Dey De Pryck, 2015).…”

Refugees’ Transnational Livelihoods and Remittances: Syrian Mobilities in the Middle East Before and After 2011

“…Before 2011, rural women sometimes travelled abroad with their husbands and children, and undertook low-skilled tasks in agriculture. There is limited evidence of female labour contractors and all-female wage labour groups in Syria in the 2000s ( Abdelali-Martini and Dey De Pryck 2015 ), but in present-day Jordan, Syrian women usually went to the fields with male relatives, earned lower wages, and their salaries were often handed over to their fathers. A new experience for many Syrians, though, is that NGOs have a preference for assisting and working with females ( Turner 2019 ).…”