ABSTRACT
Women's contributions to agricultural production are being increasingly recognized and documented. The extent to which women farmers make independent decisions about farming systems is still being disputed; especially when the women are wives and their husbands are in residence. This chapter focuses on how the frequency of women-headed households is determined and suggests that current methods underestimate the extent and significance of the head-of-household experience for women farmers. The accepted way to estimate the frequency of women-headed households underestimates the occurrence and importance of this experience. The farming systems research and social science literature increasingly documents the disadvantages experienced by women-headed households. Women-headed households are a category of disadvantaged households in terms of labor, land, capital, and governmental services. Correcting the underestimated frequencies of women-headed households cannot be accomplished without assessing local variation in several social variables.
