Women at the Grass Roots – Potential Leaders or Disinterested Bystanders?

This chapter presents the views of women at the grass roots of the industry are canvassed to determine why they feel that the representation of women is so low. The current hierarchical, structured style of agricultural leadership is alien to the position favoured by women in their organisations and gatherings and generated a great deal of discussion in the focus groups. Women identified their own organisations as sites where women are facilitated and nurtured without being in a subordinate position and where they can make some contribution to developing a women's agricultural discourse. As with the women in leadership positions surveyed for this research and discussed in, grass roots women see resistance from family as a major barrier. Women are not disinterested bystanders but, they are restricted in their access to leadership by financial stress, the busyness of their lives, a culture which negates them and by ideological expectations of their own secondary role in that culture.