ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that female labor is a critical but hitherto underemphasized factor in households' "optimal" production packages. Gender is a key characteristic of labor in rural Botswana, and female labor is as critically important as male labor. Any assumption that one has paid adequate attention to gender by considering "female-headed households" is as distorting as a failure to recognize that the success of male-headed households depends in large part on the availability within the household of female labor. One might ask why female cattle owners who suffer from their dependence on the labor of male relatives for plowing, as Louise Fortmann found, do not use their resources to hire labor elsewhere. Numerous analyses of the production "mix" of Tswana households have pointed out that, with the present relation between migrant wage rates and average earnings from crops, the opportunity cost of men's labor in crop production is very high.
