ABSTRACT
There is increasing urgency to implement mandates to seek gender equality in agricultural and research, policy, and practice. The failure to collect, report, or analyze even the most rudimentary sex-disaggregated data, let alone more complex issues of sex and gender, is well-documented and results in large gaps in understanding social processes associated with agricultural production and sustainability. Yet, despite growing recognition of the need to seek gender justice and women’s empowerment, both for reasons of equality and productivity, much agricultural research remains “gender free.” As part of the Gender Research Integrated Training (GRIT) program at Penn State, we review the methodological issues underpinning the integration of gender into agricultural research and conducting research using a feminist lens. This chapter outlines the distinctions between feminist epistemology, methodology, and methods; discusses approaches to gender research from a feminist perspective; and considers ideal versus real world contingencies in gender research, covering the issues and dilemmas that the gender researcher is likely to encounter. The goal is to promote research that adequately accounts for gender roles and relations as foundation for better research, policy, and ultimately practice.
