ABSTRACT
In primitive agricultural systems, the difference in productivity between male and female agricultural labour is roughly proportional to the difference in physical strength. As agriculture becomes less dependent upon human muscular power, the difference in labour productivity between the two sexes might be expected to narrow. In actual fact, however, this is far from being so. It is usually the men who learn to operate the new types of equipment while women continue to work with the old hand tools. With the introduction of improved agricultural equipment, there is less need for male muscular strength; nevertheless, the productivity gap tends to widen because men monopolize the use of the new equipment and the modern agricultural methods. In all developing countries—and in most industrialized countries—women perform the simple manual tasks in agriculture while the more efficient types of equipment, operated by animal or mechanical power, are used primarily by the men. Often, men apply modern scientific methods in the cultivation of cash crops, while their wives continue to cultivate food crops by traditional methods. Thus, in the course of agricultural development, men’s labour productivity tends to increase while women’s remains more or less static. The corollary of the relative decline in women’s labour productivity is a decline in their relative status within agriculture, and, as a further result, women will want either to abandon cultivation and retire to domestic life, or to leave for the town.
